In Scribd we have tons of analytics data generated daily that should be somehow processed. Currently we use MySQL to store all this stuff, but that is not the best option for logging lots of data. So we’ve decided to try some more specialized tools, which could help us to store and process our data. The most interesting thing which could simplify analytics data collecting was Scribe. As it turned out, installation process is not so simple as expected so here you will find a few steps manual on how to install Scribe on a developer machine.

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Last week I have posted an article on how to write ssh host name on the iTerm’s background. I have been looking for something like this for a while, and this is that killer feature, which forced me to switch to iTerm from classic Terminal app. Here I will show what settings I have tuned to get iTerm more comfortable to use as for me.

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How many ssh session do you open usually? In Scribd we have about 50 machines, and most of the time I have to connect to several of them to do my work. But there is a big problem — it’s hard to distinguish among different tabs in iTerm. Of course, you can see the host where you connected to in the tab title, but the title is really small, low contrast, etc. So I had a dream since I’ve started using Mac — to get current host written with large letters on the background.

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The power of Ruby is not only in its flexibility. It allows to create easy to maintain reusable parts of software, and also provides a way to redistribute them and integrate with your applications — RubyGems system. The only thing that could hurt developer’s brain is managing installed gems. When you are updating already installed gem, previous version will stay in gems folder and will be available to use. But why do you need all these obsolete libraries? There is a command to cleanup stale libraries in RubyGems — gem cleanup.

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Yesterday there was a first tech talk in the new co-working office X1, where I’m working now. I was talking about Scribd.com architecture (the big picture, almost no deep details). There are many things I’ve mentioned in this talk: nginx, haproxy, squid, mysql, sphinx, monit, memcached, Ruby on Rails, Amazon Web Services (EC2 and S3). Pretty interesting thing is that there was much more questions about Sphinx than about other tools.

I think it was pretty nice and successful, because I got many questions (really, really good ones), and instead of one-hour introduction we spent more than two hours in discussions and talks. I was enjoyed.

Below you could find slides from my talk (in English) and video recorded during session (in Russian).

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