1. Set up impossible deadlines.
2. Let them work overtime.
3. Don’t allow breaks.
4. Place a ban on laughing.
5. Break the coffee machine.
6. Don’t shield them from the dirty daily business.
7. Don’t challenge them.
8. Underpay them.
9. Bribe them.
10. Infiltrate a team member who is demotivated anyway.

Seen on Manuel Klimex

The scalability is a relative problem which depends on many things: the technology used, the fault tolerance and the availability of programming staff. Many people think that scalability=performance, and they are wrong as there are more aspects to be considered. For me, the scalability is to maintain the balance between the resources and the number of users, when the size of the problem increases. The size of the problem is the growth of the number of users and the resources. A graphic which represents a good scalability could be the following:

We can appreciate how well the growth of users (n) have been solved. The amount of required resources grows logarithmically.

Some good points for scalability that should be considered:

• Good database design: Normalize the database, select a suitable DBMS, consider the users’ necessities, …
• Search engines: Use a search engine for your application. Lucene is a very high-performance text search engine library. You can also consider Nutch or Solr, both based in Lucene but oriented to web applications. If you are finding some engine more basic take a look at Sphinx.
• The Keepalive problem: Enabling Keepalive for images and external files (such as CSS) is very good for clients, but bad for servers. Keeping Keepalive off we reduce a lot of the memory of the server. A good solution is to have separate images in a different server, getting the added benefit of higher browser concurrency with multiple hostnames (it will let you to load images in parallel). In YouAre, we are using Amazon Simple Storage Service to store our images.
• Cache: Cache as much of your dynamic content as possible Memcache could be a great option.
• Take care of your code: Take care of your code and it will take care of you
• Use GNU/Linux: GNU/Linux uses spare memory to cache files on disk. This means much faster I/O.

More information | Rico Mariani
More information | Shiflett
More information | No VC required

SOCIAL NETWORK

YouAre is a social network that represents a semantic graph. Nowadays we have implemented XFN (metaweb nivel), but the goal is to create a true semantic graph. We are developing a reasoner which will check the consistency of the relations between the differents nodes (or vertex) of the semantic graph. For example, in an ontology representing a basic familiar hierarchy, if a user A sets that he’s the user B’s father, and later the user B sets that he’s the user A’s father, an inconsistency will be produced, as the user cannot be father and son at the same time. In this case the system would indicate an error. In YouAre we want to go beyond simply giving an indication and be able to predict possible inconsistencies. For example, if the user A is male and he sets he’s homosexual, later if he sets that the user B (female) is his partner, the system would detect a possible inconsistency (a warning). We can create a true semantic graph with a well defined ontology. Now we can extract information from the established relations between the users.

MICROCONTENTS

We can publish microcontents in YouAre. There are three different typologies available: texts, images and videos. The texts will have a lenght of 140 characters. We will be able to publish images and videos from external services such as Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, … Also we will be able to upload ours pictures directly onto the system.

Now you can ask for an invitation in order to test YouAre. We will send out invitations in a few weeks. Whilst you are waiting, you can view a set of screenshots on Flickr. Stay tuned to YouAre.

Construmática es el portal de referencia para el sector de la arquitectura, ingeniería y construcción en España. Se trata de un agregador de contenidos (mashup), un buscador vertical y una comunidad profesional destinada a los técnicos del sector de la construcción (arquitectos, ingenieros, etc.) en España. Construmática tiene más de 400.000 visitas y 2 millones de páginas vistas mensuales.

Bajo la supervisión del Director General y en colaboración con otro programador, las funciones que realizará serán:
- Planificación y coordinación técnica
- Programación de nuevas funcionalidades y secciones
- Actualización y optimización de funcionalidades y secciones existentes

Se ofrece un entorno de trabajo muy bueno, flexibilidad horaria, ambiente informal, integración en un equipo multidisciplinar, joven y dinámico, y con un nivel muy alto desde el punto de vista técnico y de negocio. También grandes posibilidades de desarrollo profesional (programa de formación, creación y gestión de equipos, stock options, etc.)

Los requisitos son:
- Experiencia mínima de 2 años
- Conocimientos muy avanzados en programación con PHP+MySQL
- Nivel avanzado en programación Javascript
- Profesional dinámico, buen comunicador y espíritu de equipo
- Sentido de la responsabilidad, metódico y capacidad de trabajo

Por otro lado también se valorará:
- Experiencia en proyectos web y/o start-ups
- Conocimientos de SEO, accesibilidad, usabilidad y estandarización
- Conocimientos de JAVA
- Buen nivel de inglés

El tipo de contrato a priori es indefinido y la jornada será fulltime (8 horas al día). Si estáis interesados no dudéis en contactar conmigo: contactar

The result of this last (and first) edition has been Adlemons. I haven’t read very much about it, but reading the name I can deduce it’s something related to advertising. I’ve read an interview in Loogic that they’re going to launch Adlemons the next 11th December. Congratulations Luv.

Fuente | TechCrunch

Google Custom Search Business Edition ofrece una inmensa cantidad de parámetros para refinar y concretar la búsqueda por parte del usuario. Puedes probarlo en Construmática realizando una búsqueda dentro del site: Acero.

Más información | Construmática