Posts tagged Simon
Lanyrd’s Simon Willison on Today’s Web Stack
Feb 1st
Once upon a time, the default stack for a lot of developers consisted of the LAMP stack. Linux, Apache, MySQL and one of the P triumvirate: PHP, Python or Perl. Those days, however, are over. Sure, Linux is still powering a lot of servers. But above that, almost everything is up for grabs. Today at the Monki Gras conference in London, Simon Willison of held forth on the new Web stack.
Willison was part of the day’s last talk, a conversation with Matt Biddulph, formerly Nokia’s head of data strategy for location and commerce applications.
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Willison and Biddulph talked a lot about the history of Lanyrd and how technology choices could give developers or a project an enormous lead on competition. What was particularly interesting, though, was the list of tools that Willison recommends for building new Web-based applications.
The New Tools
The biggest decision used to be which Web framework to choose. While that’s still important, Willison said that infrastructure is much more important.
First, Willison says that you need a message queue and workers. He suggests the Python-based Celery distributed task queue. “Once you have it,” says Willison “all sorts of things become super-easy.”
Next, you need a full-text search engine. Here, Willison suggests Solr.
Willison also talked glowingly about the Redis key-value store. Redis, he says “is in a category all its own.” Not a database, exactly, Willison calls it a “data structure server” that is “so screamingly fast, things you thought of doing that would have a performance impact, you don’t have to think about” at all.
Finally, Willison recommends Varnish, which is billed as a Web-application accelerator on the front end.
Of course, things are changing rapidly. What’s crucial today may not be that relevant tomorrow. The important thing is to keep an eye on open source projects and evaluate them for use in your work. Willison says “any tech advantage means you can iterate faster.”
How does Willison evaluate tools? He says he typically gives them 30 minutes. If he can’t have a tool up and running within 30 minutes, it goes by the wayside. Sometimes this is a mistake. He cited Puppet as a tool that Lanyrd finally embraced after incurring “a huge technical debt” because it couldn’t be set up easily in 30 minutes. Note that the 30-minute rule is not to put something into production, but simply to have working and see what a tool is capable of.
By necessity, Willison and Biddulph’s talk was a bit breezy and not in great depth. However, it does provide some insight into what some of the more cutting-edge developers are using. What’s your suggested Web stack?
(Update: Willison’s name was misspelled as Willinson on the conference agenda, and I carried the error to the original text of the story. Willison’s name has been corrected. Apologies for the error.)
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Lanyrd’s Simon Willinson on Today’s Web Stack
Feb 1st
Once upon a time, the default stack for a lot of developers consisted of the LAMP stack. Linux, Apache, MySQL and one of the P triumvirate: PHP, Python or Perl. Those days, however, are over. Sure, Linux is still powering a lot of servers. But above that, almost everything is up for grabs. Today at the Monki Gras conference in London, Simon Willinson of held forth on the new Web stack.
Willinson was part of the day’s last talk, a conversation with Matt Biddulph, formerly Nokia’s head of data strategy for location and commerce applications.
Sponsor
Willinson and Biddulph talked a lot about the history of Lanyrd and how technology choices could give developers or a project an enormous lead on competition. What was particularly interesting, though, was the list of tools that Willinson recommends for building new Web-based applications.
The New Tools
The biggest decision used to be which Web framework to choose. While that’s still important, Willinson said that infrastructure is much more important.
First, Willinson says that you need a message queue and workers. He suggests the Python-based Celery distributed task queue. “Once you have it,” says Willinson “all sorts of things become super-easy.”
Next, you need a full-text search engine. Here, Willinson suggests Solr.
Willinson also talked glowingly about the Redis key-value store. Redis, he says “is in a category all its own.” Not a database, exactly, Willinson calls it a “data structure server” that is “so screamingly fast, things you thought of doing that would have a performance impact, you don’t have to think about” at all.
Finally, Willinson recommends Varnish, which is billed as a Web-application accelerator on the front end.
Of course, things are changing rapidly. What’s crucial today may not be that relevant tomorrow. The important thing is to keep an eye on open source projects and evaluate them for use in your work. Willinson says “any tech advantage means you can iterate faster.”
How does Willinson evaluate tools? He says he typically gives them 30 minutes. If he can’t have a tool up and running within 30 minutes, it goes by the wayside. Sometimes this is a mistake. He cited Puppet as a tool that Lanyrd finally embraced after incurring “a huge technical debt” because it couldn’t be set up easily in 30 minutes. Note that the 30-minute rule is not to put something into production, but simply to have working and see what a tool is capable of.
By necessity, Willinson and Biddulph’s talk was a bit breezy and not in great depth. However, it does provide some insight into what some of the more cutting-edge developers are using. What’s your suggested Web stack?
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
5 Questions with Citrix CTO Simon Crosby About His Stealth Startup Bromium
Jun 22nd
Today at the GigaOM Structure event in San Francisco Citrix Data Center and Virtualization CTO Simon Crosby announced that he and Xen founder Ian Pratt are stepping down and starting a new company called Bromium. The company also announced that it closed a series A to the tune of $9.2 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
We caught up with Crosby by phone today to ask a few questions about the Bromium’s plans.
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Bromium is in stealth mode, but in a blog post Crosby revealed that Bromium is “fusing deep virtualization and security systems DNA to build a powerful set of tools that can offer continuous endpoint protection.” Crosby wrote that Bromium won’t compete with any existing virtual infrastructure or security vendor.
Though the name may sound more like a high-end competitor to AXE Body Spray than a technology company, Crosby told GigaOM’s Derrick Harris to think about another technology with which Bromium rhymes. Chromium is the obvious answer, suggesting that this may have something to do with Google browser, or perhaps Chromium/ChromeOS.
Note: this is a rough and somewhat edited transcript due to a poor connection quality of our phone call.
ReadWriteWeb: Why did you decide to start a new company instead of pursuing these projects at Citrix?
Simon Crosby: This is very much in the domain of systems security, so it’s not part of the core DNA of Citrix. It’s a different domain from Citrix, though it’s still related to virtualization. We talked to Citrix about it and we all agreed that we needed to have a passionate team focused on that particular business problem.
It sounds like you think that trust and perception are actually bigger problems than the actual security of the public cloud, is that correct?
Trust is a multifaceted and subjective measure. I think people’s mistrust in the public cloud is largely misplaced. This comes largely from a perception of cloud providers being somehow untrustworthy, but the reality is that cloud providers will often build something that’s more secure than the enterprise would build themselves. Cloud providers have people dedicated to security.
Some people think of the cloud as insecure because they’ve been attack through the cloud. For example, the RSA breach or Operation Aurora, where Chinese hackers exploited Internet Explorer 6.
Moreover, you will not be more secure in the private cloud than the public cloud because I can walk in through the front door on any of your employees PCs.
What do you see as the biggest cloud/virtualization security problem that is not currently being addressed by other vendors? It sounds like you think the client is the biggest problem.
The point of the client is to ensure that all running code is protected at all times. That’s the problem Bromium is trying to solve.
Will the products Bromium offers work with virtualizations products other than Xen, such as those offered by VMware or Microsoft?
Bromium is not based at all on the hypervisor technology that is in use at all. The core intellectual property is hypervisor independent.
I know it’s too early to say much, but given your background in open source, can we expect Bromium to open-source some of its code?
I think that in the cloud business open source is the most valuable tool in the toolbox. That’s been a core element of everything I’ve learned in the past six years or so. So yes, we’re absolutely committed to that. Some components may be proprietary, some may be open source, much as we’ve done at Citrix.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Simon Cowell Attempts to Clear His Bad Repuation with SEO Optimization – Chip Chick
Aug 12th
 Chip Chick |
Simon Cowell Attempts to Clear His Bad Repuation with SEO Optimization
Chip Chick Supposedly, Cowell has hired an SEO Optimization firm to make sure that all Google searches on his name only produce stories of him cuddling with bunnies … Simon Cowell uses SEO Simon Cowell Is Smart! Business Matters: Simon Cowell, S-Curve, Eminem and more |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Simon Cowell uses SEO – Last Click News
Aug 12th
 Last Click News |
Simon Cowell uses SEO
Last Click News Reports say that the 50-year-old has been using search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure that top search results for his name are positive stories about … Simon Cowell Is Smart! Business Matters: Simon Cowell, S-Curve, Eminem and more |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Simon Cowell Is Smart! – PerezHilton.com (blog)
Aug 11th
 PerezHilton.com (blog) |
Simon Cowell Is Smart!
PerezHilton.com (blog) Simon Cowell is rumored to have hired an SEO firm that places positive stories about the former American Idol judge at the top of search engine results! … Business Matters: Simon Cowell, S-Curve, Eminem and more |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Former ‘American Idol’ judge Simon Cowell uses SEO firm to show people he’s … – New York Daily News
Aug 11th
 Monsters and Critics.com |
Former 'American Idol' judge Simon Cowell uses SEO firm to show people he's …
New York Daily News After a 12 hour "hiatus," the source says the blog was reinstated, and after Ebert did some investigating, the trail led to "an SEO company out of Bangalore … Simon Cowell using SEO firm to show people he's actually good |
View full post on SEO – Google News
