I have never in my life been asked, “How do porcupines make love?”. However, I know the answer very well: “very carefully”. In the same vein, when migrating the mass of data that makes up Github, you take your time and you work very, very carefully. Since this sort of migration doesn’t happen every day, […]
Some comments on Github’s blog post “How We Made Github Fast” have been asking about why ldirectord was chosen as the load balancer for the new site. Since I made most of the architecture decisions for the Github project, it’s probably easiest if I answer that question directly here, rather than in a comment. Why […]
It’s been interesting to look at the press coverage, blog posts, and tweets surrounding the move of Github to an Anchor-managed infrastructure — I’ve never worked on something so public before. I think the article about “Vampire Programmers” has been my favourite so far. The ZDnet article on the Github move gave me a wry […]
Impressions from the first article (in its first day) and the first 24 hours of the GitHub migration, have caused us at Anchor to believe that; GitHub is just as popular as we thought, The migration was worth it, as things are running much faster (just check your twitter feeds, or better yet, check your […]
At Anchor we do not believe in black box solutions. Sharing is caring and we like to share. In this post we specifically want to share our triumph with Project StarBug, better known to the wider world as GitHub. For the uninitiated, GitHub is ‘Social Networking meets Source Code management’, or in GitHubs own words […]
(Yeah, I’ve been really slack with the blog posts about Project Starbug, but unfortunately when the choice is between doing the cool stuff, and blogging about it, the blogging tends to lose. I am still planning on writing all about things when things die down. In the meantime…) Remember when you were a kid, and […]
Given that you’ve been suddenly and completely convinced of the need for documentation in my previous post, the question still remains: how does one make documentation appear on a consistent and ongoing basis? If you’re really, really lucky, you’ve been spared the painful experience of putting up a wiki somewhere (or, worse, forked out a […]
Long before any code gets written or any servers deployed, a quiet yet crucial job is being performed. The poor tech who is doing this work won’t get much credit, and almost certainly none of the glory, but if this job isn’t done properly, then none of what gets done later will be of much […]
Anchor recently signed a new customer. This is not normally news, but then again, this is not a normal customer. They’re fairly sizeable, and need a large scale dedicated infrastructure to handle their request volume. Because of the scale of the development, and some of the novel approaches we’re going with, we’ve decided to blog […]