Jim Zimmerman

I have been using Twitter lately and have really gotten into it.  I mostly use it with SMS from my palm treo 700w and have enjoyed the few people I actually follow and find great value in listening to the twitter of these people.  That being said, i have been really curious as to how this system is architected and since i work for a company that is creating a social network for sports among other things, i am fascinated on how to scale a social graph.  The problem seems to be with messaging and more critical the friends feed.  The scale and queries of finding what friends are up to can be a very tricky scalability problem.  I became even more fascinated with this after reading this post: Scaling a Microblogging Service

Also it is refreshing to hear from that actual developers that are creating this system: http://dev.twitter.com/2008/05/youve-got-qs-weve-got-as.html

For any of us that have created a site that actually needs to worry about scale can respect what it feels like when there is slow response or down time from your site.  It is fun and challenging, but sometimes is a thankless job.  For those of you that thrive on the passion of making a real cool service, I commend you and want to give thanks for fixing things that are not so easy to fix, but make the biggest impact system wide.  Those are usually the hardest to find.

I am currently moving a project from a typical webforms project to the new asp.net mvc framework project.  I am already seeing some huge benefits that I wanted to share with others.  Of course there is no viewstate in asp.net mvc and this has its advantages.  The most significant change is the size of my home page.  the amount of text in the page is down over 40%.  so my home page was 32K and now it is only 18K.  I am noticing even quicker page response times also running locally and on the server.  The page just seems to render faster, especially when hitting the back button.  Also it just feels cleaner without all those controls and I can have 100% control of the html that spits out.  It reminds me of back in the classic asp and PHP days, but without all the pain.  I did not realize how much I missed just writing straight html without controls.  

At first I thought that it would slow me down and that I would have to write more code,  but I think the opposite is true.   I don't have to deal with code behind any more and I can test so much easier now the action that every form calls.  I was able to convert an existing website that had Ajax control toolkit, membership services and several contact forms in about a week.  Not even that if you counted the hours.  Not too bad.  These tutorials really helped me out: http://www.asp.net/LEARN/3.5-extensions-videos/#mvc

We are about ready to go into production with these bits as we see that it is very stable and since we have the source code to the entire framework in our source tree, it feels safe since we can always fix a bug in the framework if we need to.  You can get the source code here: ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 Source Code

Ever since I have seen the Kindle - wireless reading device , I have wanted to buy one and read the Pragmatic Programmer on it among many other books.  I am trying to figure out the best way to get my wife to agree that this is the thing I need.  I am thinking that maybe reading on it instead of the laptop in bed might be a good reason since this laptop is so bright when she is sleeping sometimes.  You know when you really want something that you have looked at it so many times, trying to find the one reason why you shouldn't get it, but you keep reading good review after good review.  Maybe I can win one at a conference or if I visualize that it is in my hand, it will just magically appear.  That would not be the first time that has happened.  It did with my Zune 80.