Julian Martinez’s Blog

On Saturday I went to Stanford University to attend Startup School.
An event aimed at teaching technical people what they need to know
about starting a startup. Luckily I was in SF this week so I only had
to drive to Palo Alto (50km south of SF).

They invited an impressive list of the speakers:

• Caterina Fake, Co-Founder, Flickr
• Mark Fletcher, Founder, Bloglines; Founder, ONElist
• Paul Graham, Partner, Y Combinator; Co-founder, Viaweb
• Joe Kraus, Co-founder, JotSpot; Co-founder, Excite
• Page Mailliard, Partner, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
• Om Malik, Senior Writer, Business 2.0
• Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media
• Chris Sacca, Head of Special Initiatives, Google
• Joshua Schachter, Founder, del.icio.us
• George Willman, Associate, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
• Ann Winblad, Founding Partner, Hummer Winblad

The
talks were excellent and I also got a chance to meet many interesting
people from the Internet industry in the US such as Tim O’Reilly, Om
Malik, and others. I think we should try and convince Paul to organise something similar in Europe for Autumn 2006!

The Kresge Auditorium was full!

Tim O’Reilly from O’Reilly Media

Ann Winblad talking about software economics

Om Malik from Gigaom

Stanford University Map (it’s a really big University!)

Today I found this really interesting article in the NYT
about working with two monitors. Apparently adding an extra monitor
will give your output a considerable boost 20 percent to 30 percent,
according to a survey by Jon Peddie Research.

When I am shopping on the Web, my two screens let me compare products.
When I work on tables or spreadsheets, I can see all the columns at
once. When I expect important messages, I keep my e-mail program open
on the side monitor while I work on something else.

I love the two monitor solution. What’s
more, just about everyone at Adoos uses two flat monitors (2 x 17″ or 2
x 19″). It looks expensive but is not, 17″ LG are 200€ each! and I
think Benq is even cheaper. Here is my home setup (total cost: CPU + 2x
17 inch monitors = 700 Euros)

I have to admit that today I was pretty impressed with how many
people use Gumtree in London. I connected to the Internet at three
different cybercafes in London (throughout the day) and every single
time I had someone next to me browsing classifieds on Gumtree!
Congratulations to the Gumtree team!

This also reminds me that
we need to start Adoos UK as soon as possible. The UK has an incredibly
high number of students and foreigners looking for housing and jobs!

I took some pictures with my phone:

It’s been a while since I last came to London and coming back has
been a little nostalgic. Before setting up Adoos I lived here for 8
years (1995 to 2003) and most of my friends are still around. Anyway,
here are some photos I took today with my phone:

This is me!
Not used to wearing a suit lately…

Apple’s new shop in Regent Street
(very nice stuff in here! My favourite is their 30″ flat screens.)

Oxford / Regent Street
(A classic… I just had to take this picture)

I visited Yahoo in London
(Unfortunately I was not allowed to take a picture inside their offices, only the front desk).

A picture’s worth a thousand words and that’s why today we’ve
started including image thumbs within the listings page. Initially we
are implementing the thumbs for the property and motor sections for all
countries.

However, implementing thumbs has serious
implications for our business model and that’s why we need to carefully
evaluate the publishing patterns. Users currently pay 10 Euros per ad
to promote their items with a thumb and we now need to find alternative
ways to make their premium ads standout from the rest.

Here is a summary of some pros and cons.

Pros:
- Picture provides more information. (What colour is that car?)
- User friendly list. (Easier for first time users)
- Encourages advertiser to upload a picture of their products.

Cons:
- We canibalises our “Premium Ad” revenues. (Major concern!!)
- Weight doubles.  Listings page becomes heavier (200Kb).
- Takes longer to load the page. (Might affect dialup connections).
- Increases our server load. (Minor issue I think).

Here are two examples:

Screenshot 1: List of properties in Malaga

Screenshot 2: List of second hand VW Golf

I was so tired of waiting for Google Calendar that I thought it was a myth.
Well, its finally here, better late than never! and it even comes with an API .

To
be honest the timing has been just perfect for me because I was about
to buy a Blackberry this week to organise myself. I think I’ll give the
Blackberry idea a miss now.

Here is my first attempt at
organising my stuff, I have created three overlaying calendars. 1)
Meetings, reminders, appointments, 2) Birthdays, 3) Travel details.

Today I found a really interesting presentation of Flickr’s backend. You can download it here, but I warn you, this is hardcore techie stuff..!! There are also two interesting presentations of LiveJournal’s backend here and here.
This stuff is incredibly useful to us because it provides us guidance
for implementing the best engineering practices for our backend.

Information architecture is the core
of our business and I spend 60% of my time (at Adoos) thinking about
how to structure and organise information. Architecture is what makes
the application robust and scalable. How do I make sure this ship doesn’t sink when we try to grow from 1 million visitors to 50 million?

What
I would love to see also is a diagram of the architecture of AdWords
and Google Search, but unfortunately that’s not possible…

FLICKR’S BACKEND

Flickr
is possibly the best online photo management and sharing application in
the world. The application is built with PHP, Apache, MySQL using
InnoDB and MyISAM.

Backend DNA:
• PHP 4
• Smarty for templating
• PEAR for XML and Email parsing
• Perl for controlling…
• ImageMagick, for image processing
• MySQL (4.0 / InnoDb)
• Java, for the node service
• Apache 2, Redhat, etc. etc.

Some Numbers:
• One programmer, one designer, etc.
• ~60,000 lines of PHP code
• ~60,000 lines of templates
• ~70 custom smarty functions/modifiers
• ~25,000 DB transactions/second at peak
• ~1000 pages per second at peak

Application Architecture:

LIVEJOURNAL’S BACKEND

LiveJournal is a free blogging
service. They’ve written an excellent presentation of how to scale an
open-source web service from 1 server to 100+ servers.

Backend DNA:
- 100+ servers
- Linux, Debian
- Apache, Perl
- MySQL (InnoDB & MyISAM)
- perlbal -  open source HTTP proxy
- memcached – open source distributed caching system
- mogileFS – opensource distributed file system
- Nagios, Cricket
- BIG-IPs

Some Numbers:
- 50+ million dynamic pageview/days.
- 5+ million accounts.
- 30 GB of cached data.
- ~100,000 queries per second at peak.

Server architecture diagram: