Developer Blog

Rolling out to 4 Global Regional Datacenters in 25 minutes

26 October 2010

Sometimes I just have to sit back and reflect on the amazing operational power available on AWS. As you know, we are hardcore AWS-ers here at Bizo and we've been running in all 4 regions for several months. Recently we needed to roll out a new service which we wanted to be Globally Load Balanced (GSLB) and the rollout was astoundingly quick and easy.

An experiment in file distribution from S3 to EC2 via bittorrent

21 October 2010

Amazon's autoscaling service is fantastic. It allows you to dynamically scale the number of instances running your application based on a variety of triggers, including CPU usage, request latency, I/O usage, and more. Thus, you can increase your capacity in response to increased demand for your services.

modern IDEs influencing coding style?

1 October 2010

It would be nice if globals, locals, and members could be syntax colored differently. That would be better than g_ and m_ prefixes.

Killing java processes

1 October 2010

I often want to kill java processes, be it an unresponsive Eclipse, a blown-out jEdit after I try to open a 2GB file, a stalled JUnit test suite, a borked scalac compiler daemon or a random Tomcat instance.

emr: Cannot run program "bash": java.io.IOException: error=12, Cannot allocate memory

29 September 2010

Moving one of our jobs from hive 0.4 / hadoop 0.18 to hive 0.5 / hadoop 0.20 on amazon emr, I ran into a weird error in the reduce stage, something like:

Salesforce and DART Synchronization

21 September 2010

I’ve recently started some work that involves extending Salesforce for our Ad Ops team. For our most recent Hack Day, I decided to do a little project to continue learning about development with the Salesforce cloud platform, Force.com.

quick script: emr-mailer

20 September 2010

We write a lot of hive reports. Frequently we want to email the resulting report to a list. In the past I've usually done this with some one-off post processing scripts, but I thought it would be nice to write a reusable emr job step that will execute as part of the hive job.

hackday: analog meters

13 August 2010

For this last hackday, I decided to work on something more hardware hacking related. At this year's Maker Fair, I was really inspired by all the cool stuff people were building, so I picked up an arduino and started playing around with a couple of things.

Collecting User Actions with GWT

13 August 2010

While I was at one of the Google I/O GWT sessions (courtesy of Bizo), a Google presenter mentioned how one of their internal GWT applications tracks user actions.

Extending Hive with Custom UDTFs

29 July 2010

Let’s take a look at the canonical word count example in Hive: given a table of documents, create a table containing each word and the number of times it appears across all documents.