I'm back in San Francisco, and I'm not dead.

That was one crazy-fast road trip.

After a few solid months of staying within the city limits of San Francisco hacking to my heart's content on a few Facebook products, my OpenMoko, some Mono libraries that I'm building, and other stuff I shouldn't talk about, I'm taking a break.

A friend of mine has taken my advice and is moving to the west coast now that she's graduated and is ready to see what the world has to offer outside of Boston. Part of my obligation it would seem as the giver of (fantastic) advice is that I will now help her drive 2,968 miles from Washington D.C., to Santa Barbera.

I'm debating buying a camera once I arrive in D.C. later today. If anybody has any suggestions for reasonably priced, good digital cameras, please let me know.

This should be fun.


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I figured I'd go ahead and include some of the Facebook Developer Garage videos that were recently posted to YouTube, including ones of me giving my presentation.

Coping with Success

Part One


Part Two


And of course Dave Fetterman, the lead engineer on the Facebook Platform gave a good talk (preceeding mine)

From Facebook

Part One


Part Two


Part Three


In general it was a great event, both technically, but also in terms of networking and sharing knowledge and ideas we've all accrued through our work on the platform. Slide had a good showing in my opinion and I think we did a good job of offering up advice where we could in terms of scaling, technical "gotchas" on the platform, and whatever else we could offer up to the community.

Around 300 showed up this time around, I'm hoping closer to 400 or 500 show up for the next Facebook Developer event that's held in the bay area, but we'll see.

Videos courtesy of dalmaer

Despite resisting the temptation to come on stage chanting "developers, developers, developers!" I think the entire Facebook Developer Garage - Palo Alto was great success. Application developers from (in my opinion) well over half of the popular applications on Facebook and a lot of independent application developers showed up and in general good times were had by all.



As far as my presentation went, I was apparently "a great speaker, spoke in depth about building apps thats scale." But in general the feedback was very good, and I spent most of the rest of the day talking to individual developers about short-term and then longer term growth and how to attack that from a developer's perspective.

Since I've updated the presentation, it's posted here again.

Coping with Success (PDF)

Somewhere amongst the stress of this past week, I neglected to mention that this weekend, i.e. today, there will be a Facebook Developer Garage in Palo Alto Co-hosted by Slide.

I'll be speaking, giving the presentation I previously mentioned not being able to give, on scaling on the Facebook platform and some of the key things to consider when choosing between and FBML or an IFrame based application.

Not only will I be there, but most of the Slide/Facebook crew will be there along with (at latest count) about 300 people from around Silicon Valley who are interested in developing, monetizing, and creating on top of the Facebook platform.

Feel free to stop on by to watch me say "um" too many times in front of 300 of my peers, good times will be had by all.

So last time we spoke I just arrived in college station during the spring semester. It has been a while! So I decided to come back after talking to my buddy tyler last night, I was reminded of the good times I had on unethical blogger (even though I only posted once). So I think I am going to start a weekly blog of things that scared the shit of of me this week. Many readers will laugh at this weeks, I did not find the situation funny.

WHAT SCARED ME?

RACCOONS?

As I was throwing out the trash, I hit a raccoon with a box and I jumped out of the dumpster and almost killed me. Luckily I have learned from Chuck Norris So that Raccoon was good as dead. Bust still they need to die.

I have also started a new thing with my buddy tyler, when I call tyler for tech support, I give him a dollar. So far he has earned 4. By the end of the year I would not be surprised if he has earned at least 50 from me.

Anywhoo my quesidillla is done so I gotsta jet.

As always I am your humble mexican friend,

The Roy

Sometimes Max tells me things that I find hard to believe, but after I verify that he's not just telling tall tales, they inevitably turn out to be 100% correct, which is scary.

Jokingly I mentioned that "Max is a robot" today, to which he promptly corrected me stating that "it's already known" that Max Levchin is a cyborg.

Some of my favorite quotes from this obviously factual article are:

• "The man is ripped. What human engineer has biceps?"
• "When he worked at PayPal doing security (alert: common robot job).."

The WD-40 he keeps in his left back pocket, and the obvious mechanical extension of his hand (which assumes the shape of a Blackberry) should have been dead give-aways, but I somehow glazed over this.

I've been thinking and experimenting a lot with MySQL 5, and PostgreSQL 8.3, trying to figure out which database server would be most optimal for scaling larger web applications.

I've brought some of my MySQL optimization tips into a small e-book styled guide, something I hope will help my fellow developers understand what they are getting into before choosing a production environment with MySQL 4, or MySQL 5 in contrast to PostgreSQL.

If you have any other tips for scaling with MySQL, I'll make sure I add them to my little e-book and release and updated PDF file :)


Scaling MySQL (PDF)

Thanks City of San Francisco for not being able to tell the differences between at least two of the three characters in my license plate.

I'd feel guilty, but if my street is marked for "Street Cleaning" three days a week, I'd like to see it cleaned at least twice a week.

What a racket.

I figured I'd go ahead and post this now since the format is of the "App Dev Conference" (InsideFacebook coverage) is more paneled than the original "small presentations" I assumed it to be. Oops.

We talked about a few topics from a developer perspective, such as a minor gripe session on Facebook breaking FBML, but the highlights of our developer's panel are monetizing and growing the user engagement inside the applications. I was on the panel with Blake Commagere (Vampires), Dave Genztel, (SocialMedia), Jia Shen, (RockYou), Joe Winterhalter (Quizzes), James Hong (HotOrNot). Fortunately for me, I get to do cool stuff like this, almost as the "voice" of Top Friends despite the fact that Top Friends is a definite Slide property with more smart people behind it than just me alone.

Regardless, in between fixing some bugs last night, I hacked up a presentation citing some of the various means of scaling and designing your application to scale appropriately, I also made sure to discuss some of the lower-level scalability with one of our brilliant server guys, to cover the bases from application-level scaling to database and Facebook API scaling.

I hope you enjoy my presentation with notes included:
Coping with Success: Scaling on the Facebook Platform (PDF)
Coping with Success: Scaling on the Facebook Platform (Flickr)