I was just reading the "Building Scalable Websites" book [1] released in 2006. At that time, "DevOps" was called SysAdmins. And there were also DBAs, Network engineers, among others.

> The way to do DevOps is to fire all of the Ops and then tell all of the Devs that they are now doing DevOps; you simply can't have it both ways,

I think this points at what happened: Startup scrappy culture started permeating new technology companies, which meant no budget for DBAs, QAs, SysAdmins and other similar roles. So decision-makers fired all those roles and ask Programmers to fill the voids. At the same time "cloud computing" started to mature, so there was a change from hardware/operating-systems tinkering to software related tinkering.

One just has to see the decline of "SlashDot" which was a very SysAdmin/Operating-System focused website, in favor of news.ycombinator and similar more software-oriented forums.

[1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/building-scalable-web/0...

A modern version of Cal Henderson's "Building Scalable Web Sites" would be nice to have. I'm sure a lot of it still applies, but it was written a decade ago: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596102357.do

"On Flickr.com, a new feature called Camera Roll organizes them into a reverse-chronological timeline."

10 years on flickr in September.

Retarded idea. Where does the time information come from? The upload time (user & flickr controlled) or EXIF (camera controlled). My bet it's the EXIF which relies on a camera having the correct date. With 20K+ images a lot without correct dates. That's why I generate the dates in tags and titles for own search. Yahoo search is a joke.

"Using Yahoo’s image-recognition technology, Flickr will generate dynamic albums for you across 60 categories including people, animals, landscapes, panoramas, and architecture."

I don't want Yahoo's stupid idea of organisation of images. This isn't for users, people who pay. It's for viewers who search, don't pay but consume and so Yahoo makes $$$.

"But the real opportunity is in helping people manage and browse their smartphone photos"

Nope, still like my choice of camera, pre-processing and manual uploading.

"What’s impressive is what it’s doing for free:"

One of the great things about the web is you can put a face to the words. Casey you missed the chance to ask why the site is un-usable to show a page, why the front-end is rendered at the client and poor user design decisions like reducing the screen usage area. Flickr screen clutter has increased over the years making it harder to view and use.

Flickr never recovered after the departure of Butterfield, Fake and Henderson.

Read:

How flickr started: "This Story About Slack's Founder Says Everything You Need To Know About Him"

http://www.fastcolabs.com/3026418/open-company/this-story-ab...

Technology behind it: Cal Henderson, "Building Scalable Web Sites"

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596102357.do

Slack: Latest Company by founders:

http://www.fastcolabs.com/3026418/open-company/this-story-ab...

If what you're really after is designing a scalable website - which is very different from system admin stuff - I think the "Building Scalable Websites" book is a great place to start: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596102357.do

Perhaps a bit dated (2006), but most of it would still be relevant.

I'd never heard of the C10K (http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html) but I love scaling issues and this looks to be some fascinating reading. Thanks!

EDIT Interesting annecdote... Cal Henderson is the author of "Building Scalable Websites" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596102356 and has worked in "the trenches" as the lead engineer of FLICKR and developer at B3TA.

Apparently his newest company http://tinyspeck.com/ is using node.js for their game engine.

Assuming he's planning on scaling to a reasonable size, that seems to be a pretty resounding endorsement that there's at least something going for it. I mean ... that guy's got a bit of experience in working at scale.

Yeah, Cal's fish book (hah, scaling...) is better - http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596102357

Can anyone speak to how close these books come to this? Or recommend other books?

Building Scalable Web Sites http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596102357

The Art of Capacity Planning http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596518585

Web Operations http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920000136

If scalability is relevant to your product, this is an accessible classic:

http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Applicatio...