If you don’t need to handle any state (storage beyond each web request) in your web application, you can use the stateless scaling approach. The stateless scaling approach is pretty simple. You get what is called a load balancer and put a bunch of servers behind it. A good load balancer can handle hundreds if not thousands of servers, so you should be good for quite a lot of traffic before you’d need a different strategy such as DNS round robin or multi-homed IPs. Of course, the load balancer here is a single point of failure, so if you are worried about downtime if the load balancer ever fails, you should look into some other high availability solutions. You can keep adding (and removing servers) from the load balancer as traffic goes up and down. A good way to do this is with Amazon EC2’s auto-scaling feature. (Disclosure: I own some Amazon stock)

If you need to store state in your web application (which is usually the case) you need a different strategy for scaling out the storage. A good strategy here is what is know as partitioning or sharding. The idea is to split up the data onto different servers in some way. What you need is some form of a distributed hash table. The data is typically split based on the primary key, in other words, the identifier that is most often used to access the data. Once you get a large enough set of data, you’ll need a way to split up the data such that when you add or remove a server, you don’t have to shuffle all the data around. For this, I would suggest using a concept known as consistent hashing. If you are just storing files, I’d recommend going with Amazon’s S3 which does this sharding for you, basically infinitely. If you need faster access to a bunch of smaller pieces of data look at MySQL or try one of the many NoSQL database systems out there, some of which have built in sharding.

In a software startup, your source code is like your crown jewels. Losing your source code can be disastrous.

This is primarily why I switched from svn to git, and why you should too.

If there’s anyone actually subscribed to my blog that doesn’t care about this… sorry, I just use it as a dumping ground for information.

Since some of this info is protected, I’ll just refer you to the protected URL that has the info:
https://www.itcom.itd.umich.edu/vpn/software/UM-on-campus-wireless.pcf

Go to System Preferences, Network.
Click the plus sign in the lower left to add a new connection.
Interface: VPN
VPN Type: Cisco IPSec (if this doesn’t show up, try downloading the Cisco VPN client from here)
Server address: <host in the pcf file>
Account name: <your uniqname>
Password: <your regular umich password>
Click “Authentication Settings…”
Shared secret: <grouppwd in the pcf file>
Group Name: <groupname in the pcf file>

Microsoft/BizSpark got a lot of bad press as a result. Clint Nelson, one of the guys behind of the national Startup Weekend organization posted a blog entry called Sticking Up for the Big Guy. You might want to read that since what follows is basically my response to that article.

Startup Weekend is a great concept. It’s a great community building event where people in the same city interested in the same thing (namely building a startup) get together for a weekend and work together. You get to meet new people, and get to know people better that you’ve already met. But, the fact of the matter is most teams formed at Startup Weekend don’t continue working together on the startup after the weekend is over. So, saying that “we launched 15 startups that otherwise would not exist” is kind of a misnomer. It’s not about the startups that are launched that weekend. It’s about the connections made between the people. Hopefully those people will continue the conversation and partner to form their own startups later.

It’s great that Microsoft wants to support the startup community via BizSpark, but I feel that Microsoft is being disingenuous by only giving an award to a startup that uses Microsoft’s technology at Startup Weekend.

If they want to have their own BizSpark Weekend or whatever, that’s fine. They can run it themselves. They have enough money, they have enough people, they have a big enough marketing budget. Microsoft doesn’t need Startup Weekend to run their own event that is similar that is restricted to building on the Microsoft stack.

“Bizspark is absolutely being crucified for giving us the community exactly what we asked for.” Really? You asked them to disqualify anyone not using Microsoft technology?

In the future, please keep prize money out of Startup Weekend. kthxbye

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Even more in the comments including:

http://www.portentinteractive.com
http://www.momagenda.com
http://www.princesslodges.com
http://www.goiam.org

http://www.ringor.com

http://www.nettica.com/

http://www.motherjones.com

http://www.questionpro.com
http://micropoll.com

http://www.square1books.com

I’m going to assume you know the basics of the game. It’s pretty easy. If you don’t, you should just buy the game and give it a try. It is dead simple to learn, a lot of fun, and addicting.

Try to set up flight paths which won’t collide with anything that already has a flight path as soon as possible. If you aren’t certain whether a collision will happen or not, just keep the plane out of trouble temporarily and make a flight plane later.

Don’t think too long on any one thing. Make a decision quickly, and move on. Always keep a watch on the big picture, especially the edges where new planes come in. Don’t focus on one plane, or group of planes for too long because you won’t see the new planes coming in, and they will crash because you haven’t given them a collision-free flight plan.

After playing for a while, you will realize that the slower, non-pink aircraft usually won’t have very much flexibility in their flight plans. Because they are slow, they stay on the screen longer, taking up valuable airspace. So, you usually want to put the slower planes on a straight path to their landing locations, and make the faster ones take less direct routes if they need to go around the slower ones.

I find that the pink airplanes are the main ones I have trouble with. The key is to get them to land as soon as possible. What that means is that you should get the planes to be as close together as possible.

Remember what I said about getting a collision-free flight plan in place for each aircraft as soon as possible? Well, if you do that, it can be difficult to pack them in tightly. So, what you do is adjust. Start from the airplane closest to the runway and adjust its path so that it goes straight in. Take the next closest airplane and make its flight plan shorter, but not so short as to bump into anything.

Since the larger pink planes move faster than the smaller ones, sometimes you can get into trouble where a larger plane and a smaller plane share the same flight path, and the larger catches up with the smaller and crashes. You have to take this into account. It can be helpful to group planes. So, land all the large pink planes one after another, then land the smaller ones. There’s a contradiction here that you have to keep balanced. On the one hand, you want the slower planes to have straighter paths to get them off the screen faster. On the other hand, you want the faster planes to go in before the slower planes since you might have the faster planes run into the slower planes if you did things the other way around. Which strategy you take at which time depends on the positions of the planes and how many planes are currently on the screen.

There you go. There are my tips and tricks for the FlightControl app for iPhone. Hopefully you found these tips useful in your air traffic controling.

Here’s the short version of this for people who don’t like to read a lot, and just want the facts:

• I’m quitting Amazon.
• April 17th is my last day
• May 12th I will be moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan
• I’m starting a software company initially employing me, myself, and I
• I plan to launch a web app at the first Twitter conference on May 26th
• I estimate I have more than a year’s worth of personal runway to figure things out

I’d like to tell you all about the start of the next chapter in my life. But, before I do that, a condensed history. I don’t want to spend too much time on the past, so I’ll just say this… I was born, raised, and went to college in Michigan. Go Blue! I studied computer science, and one summer decided to learn web development. That led me to an internship and then a full time position at Amazon.com in Seattle, WA. The thing is though, I want to build my own software products. Basically, I was doing the type of work on wanted to do (namely web development) but not building the type of software that I wanted to see exist in the world.

Amazon is a great company. They are going to do just fine. I’m actually going to keep my stock, and maybe even buy more. Although, if I’m going to do serious investing in the stock market, I’ll have to look at the companies and pick ones I really believe in. Palm may actually be one of those. Their new Web OS on the Palm Pre looks pretty darn impressive.

Amazon is no longer a start up. Too much friction to get certain things done. My guess is that this problem is not unique at all to Amazon… any big company has issues like this to deal with. Once you have a lot of revenue, any change could have a big impact in the business. Since a startup, by definition, doesn’t make a lot of money, changes to the business or the software won’t have as big of impact in absolute terms. It’s all about risk verses reward. In a large company, you can spread risk across many different projects and people in the company. This is one reason why Amazon is able to do so many innovative things. They can take risks in certain areas like Kindle, AWS, AmazonFresh, etc, and even if those projects fail (which I actually doubt they will) Amazon itself will be fine as a company.

When I was an intern at Amazon, Jeff Bezos (the CEO) gave a short talk, and then left most of the time for Q&A. The question I asked was why he thinks Amazon was able to survive the dot com bust. The answer he gave was basically that the business metric graphs had very little relationship to the stock price. Even though the stock price tanked, Amazon as a business was still growing. Also, Amazon has very long term view of things. There is little to no change in strategy in tough times. It’s always lower prices, more selection, and relentless focus on the customer. I think that is as much true today as we go through this recession, as it was during the dot com bust.

I’ve wanted to do a startup for a long time, but didn’t want to spend the time looking for funding. I’d rather spend the time building the software instead. People have told me that it is generally a good idea to build it first, before you start looking for funding. I still would rather not have to spend the time seeking out funding for a startup. So, I’m going to start by bootstrapping instead. This means that I will have to have revenue very early on, ideally on day one. So, I’ll be doing some experiementing with that model over the next few months.

Why am I moving back to Michigan? Well… my family lives there. I have some friends there. There is a small, but growing tech community in Ann Arbor. It is much cheaper than Seattle.

I’ve just jumped off a cliff, and I’ll be building the airplane on the way down. I estimate that I have more than a year’s worth of falling before I hit the ground. Wish me luck!

So, either upload your image to Gmap Uploader, or go to the URL of a Gmap Uploader map you already have. After its done processing, at the bottom there will be a Deep Zoom URL. You can use this URL with either Seadragon AJAX, or Seadragon Mobile.

For Seadragon AJAX, I recommend putting this URL in the Embed The Viewer tool.

Once you’ve downloaded Seadragon Mobile to your iPhone, and opened it, follow these steps:

1. Press the plus button in the bottom right of Seadragon Mobile.
2. Select “Deep Zoom Content”.
3. Pick a name, for example, “Awesomeness”.
4. Enter the Deep Zoom URL from Gmap Uploader.
5. Press the “Done” button.
6. Be amazed.

Adding this feature probably means I need to change the name of Gmap Uploader. Any suggestions?