Goliath, Event Machine, SPDY (Interview)

Wynn caught up with Ilya Grigorik, Founder and CTO of PostRank to talk about Goliath, async Ruby web development, and Google’s SPDY.

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Featuring:

• Ilya Grigorik – Website, GitHub, X
• Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• Look for Steve Klabnik at CodeConf.
• Ilya Grigorik founder and CTO of PostRank.
• PostRank taps into intelligence from the social web.
• igvita.com is Ilya’s awesome Ruby, performance, and big data blog.
• Goliath Goliath is an open source version of the non-blocking (asynchronous) Ruby web server framework powering PostRank.
• Thin glues together Mongrel parser, Event Machine, and Rack.
• Evidently we’ve discussed Node.js “at length” on this show.
• Goliath hides much of the complexity of its asynchronous architecture from the developer
• Goliath was designed for and has been benchmarked on MRI, JRuby and Rubinius
• PostRank heavily employs AMQP
• The PostRank APIs allow you to create applications that interact with the subscription management component of the PostRank website, as well as, create and retrieve story ratings and customized RSS feeds for your users.
• The Top Posts Widget lets you showcase the most important articles on your site, encouraging viewers to click on more articles and read what matters.
• A GitHub account and a blog are key differentiators for developers looking to get hired at PostRank.
• Ilya says “presentation is 50% of the actual deliverable”. Great READMEs are important.
• Ilya looks up to Brad Fitzpatrick of LiveJournal and Memcached fame.
• Ilya’s blog tagline: “A goal is a dream with a deadline.”
• Anybody still using GTD?
• Ilya isn’t beholden to any one editor but loves both Vim and TextMate.
• SPDY: (pronounced “SPeeDY”) An experimental protocol for a faster web. The usual HTTP GET and POST message formats remain the same; however, SPDY specifies a new framing format for encoding and transmitting the data over the wire.
• If you’re using Chrome, you may be using SPDY and not even know it.
• mod_spdy is an experimental proof-of-concept SPDY Apache module.
• ØMQ zeromq: socket library that acts as a concurrency framework as discussed on Episode 0.3.4.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!