Yariv’s Blog

I attended startup school on Saturday. It was a great experience and a rare opportunity to hear to a such impressive speakers share their wisdom about technology and entrepreneurship. Some of my favorite talks were by David Heinemeier Hansson, Greg McAdoo, Marc Andreesen, Paul Buchheit and Michael Arrington. I met a bunch of programmers and entrepreneurs and I also chatted briefly with DHH about 37signals and Peter Norvig about new search startups and their chances of competing with Google. Many thanks to YCombinator for organizing such a great event!

If you haven’t attended, you can see all the videos here. Highly recommended.

I just caught Amazon’s announcement of the new persistent storage engine for EC2. This is great stuff. It lets you create persistent block level storage devices ranging from 1GB to 1TB in size and attach them to EC2 instances in predetermined availability zones. This service complements Amazon’s other storage services — EC2 and SimpleDB — in providing raw block-level storage devices that are persistent, fast and local (so you don’t have to worry about SimpleDB’s eventual consistency issues). You can use these volumes for anything — running a traditional DBMS (MySQL, Postgres) is the first thing that comes to mind.

This announcement is a departure from Amazon’s tradition of announcing services only once they become available. It looks like Amazon is feeling the heat of competition from Google App Engine and is becoming more open to win over the hearts and minds of developers who are drawn to GAE for its auto-magical scalability. The ability to attach multiple terabyte-sized volumes on demand alleviates some of those concerns when deploying on Amazon’s infrastructure. I’m sure it won’t be long before someone creates an open source BigTable-like solution for applications that need massive scalability and redundancy on top of multiple persistent storage volumes (I think this would be a great application to write in Erlang, but I don’t know how well Erlang performs in applications that require heavy disc IO).

I like what Amazon is doing. By providing the basic building blocks for scalable applications, its enables startups to create their own GAE competitors (Heroku is the first one that comes to mind) on top of Amazon’s infrastructure. Smart move.

Google has the advantage of being able to provide APIs for tight integration with other Google services such as authentication and search (the latter is hypothetical as of now). We’ll see how strongly this plays in Google’s favor in the coming months.

Of course, price is still a question mark. Neither Amazon’s persistent storage service nor GAE have had their prices announced.

Another missing detail is the Amazon store service’s reliability. If a disc fails, do you lose your data? What’s the failure probability? Etc.

All this is great for developers. Competition between Amazon and Google means developers will enjoy more services and for lower prices in the coming years.

Nick Gerakines wrote a good tutorial on how to make tag clouds in ErlyWeb. Check it out at http://blog.socklabs.com/2008/04/tag_clouds_in_erlang_with_erly/.

Erlang is *almost* a tipping point. Thanks to reddit, many people are interested in it. However, it’s not there yet. Despite being the only language that got concurrency right, and all its other standout features, many developers still use other languages. The only explanation I can think of is that Erlang hasn’t had much PR over the years (the Erlang movie nonwithstanding). I’m confident that a good PR boost will help push Erlang over the hill. Unfortunately, Ericsson doesn’t seem interested in heavily promoting Erlang the way Microsoft promotes .NET and Sun promotes Java (this may be because many Ericsson employees have never heard of Erlang). So, I decided to take things into my own hands. I don’t have a budget, so I need to get creative. The best way to succeed if you’re small is to ride a big wave — and what’s a better wave to ride than Ruby on Rails?

Ruby on Rails is very popular — much more than ErlyWeb. I believe this popularity is due to the “on Rails” meme, which is just bursting with positive connotations. It sounds young, fresh, happy. It’s the anti-enterprisy software. It emancipates you from burdensome type systems, explicit getters and setters, and (ugh) XML. Its metaprogramming wizardry is made of bliss. Its evokes images of riding in environmentally-friendly transportation looking out the window at grassy meadows, rolling hills and sunny skies.

I think that renaming ErlyWeb to “Erlang on Rails” will help win over the hearts and minds of many programmers who are currently on the fence. They may be curious about Erlang but are turned off by its telcom image. “Erlang on Rails” conveys a more balanced feeling of industrial strength applications from the telcom world mixed with the social Web 2.0 era of interconnectedness that celebrates the rise of individualism over grey corporate culture.

2008 will be the year of Erlang on Rails. I know it.

Update: This was an April Fool’s joke, in case it’s not obvious anymore :)

I just hacked together an (alpha) implementation of the FriendFeed API for Erlang. You can get the code at http://code.google.com/p/erlang-friendfeed/. Enjoy!

By the way, my shiny new FriendFeed is at http://friendfeed.com/yariv.

Nick Gerakines, the Author of Facebook Application Development, created with ErlyWeb the very cool Facebook app I Play WoW. I Play WoW bridges between real people and the characters they play on World of Warcraft. Nick told me he got a lot of feedback such as “Wow! I didn’t know my brother-in-law is in my guild!” and “Its been 5 years since I talked to some of them, but a bunch of my friends from school play on these realms and I didn’t even know they played”.

Some facts:
- 53.5k installs
- 2.9k daily active users
- 1.3k application fans
- 200+ new users a day on average
- In the past 30 days its gotten over 2 million page views where users spend more than 5 minutes on average on the application
- Erlang application layout:
* Charstore w/ Mnesia: Acts as the raw character store and cache for interactions between wowarmory.com
* I Play WoW w/ ErlyWeb + Mnesia: The front-end and ui for the application. The majority of the FB API calls are made here or are spawned from here.
* There is still one component in perl that is yet to be ported over, mainly due to not having enough time. Its on the list of things to do.

(My note: it sounds like Nick is also using spawned processes to make FB API calls asynchronously. It’s a great technique for reducing page load time and avoiding the annoying timeouts Facebook imposes on page renderings.)

If you play World of Warcraft (an addiction I’ve luckily been able to avoid this far :) ) and you are on Facebook, give I Play WoW a try. You may discover that your boss is a level 10 ogre or something :)

Congrats, Nick, for creating such a successful app with ErlyWeb!

You may have noticed I put SnapTalent (http://snaptalent) ads on my blog. This is the first time I have put ads on my blog. I’ve avoided them because ads from most ad networks are usually irritating/ugly, but the SnapTalent ones are nice looking, unobtrusive and are relevant to my blog’s readers because they advertise hacker jobs at startups. I can’t say those ads have generated substantial revenue for me thus far but at least I’ve made enough money to buy the SnapTalent guys a round of beers :)

With 78 responses so far, here are the breakdowns for the responders’ favorite Lisps:

Scheme: 41%
Common Lisp: 27%
LFE: 12%
Arc: 10%
Emacs Lisp: 6%
Clojure: 4%

You can see the full report here.

I thought that Common Lisp would get more votes Scheme (isn’t CL more widely used?), but apparently I was wrong. Arc and LFE have made an impressive showing for their young age (but this is probably due to the bias of my blog readers).

With elections around the corner and politics everywhere these days, I couldn’t resist throwing some Erlang into the mix. Don’t worry, I’m not about to start discussing my political opinions on this blog. You can find plenty of political commentary on other sites. Instead, I decided to create a sub-Vimagi for political cartoons: Presidential Vimagi.

On Presidential Vimagi, you don’t write or talk about your political views. You paint them. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a painting is worth, well, you do the math.

To give you inspiration, I assembled an all star cast of American presidents, vice presidents and presidential candidates: George Bush, Dick Cheney, Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Ron Paul, Bill Clinton and Al Gore. They each have a profile and you can paint on their profile’s v.boards. You can also become friends with them if you want to show your support.

Presidential Vimagi is still a bit rough around the edges, so please let me know if you find any bugs or issues. Feature suggestions are also welcome, of course.

Update: I decided to take the site down for now. It’s too prone to vandalism and I don’t have the time to constantly monitor it to remove the offensive stuff. It was a fun experiment while it lasted. Oh well :)

Are you on Facebook? Then join the ErlyWeb Fan Club!

If all goes according to plan, some day this fan club will have more members than the If this group reaches 4,294,967,296 it might cause an integer overflow group :)