Chaos Monkey. NetFlix shares 5 lessons learned using AWS. Hope they’ll open source Chaos Monkey:

One of the first systems our engineers built in AWS is called the Chaos Monkey. The Chaos Monkey’s job is to randomly kill instances and services within our architecture. If we aren’t constantly testing our ability to succeed despite failure, then it isn’t likely to work when it matters most – in the event of an unexpected outage.

Every company needs one. The Zappos core value API.

Well said. Ellen Beldner shares his design principles:

Make the computer guess what the user wants – don’t make the person guess what the computer wants. Don’t make users structure their own data: automate, prefill, guess, and parse. Just because we can’t perfectly handle every weird address format that someone might enter doesn’t mean that we can’t speed up the lives of the 98% of people who will enter something recognizable.

MongoDB monitoring. Six parts, first one out and deals with the limits of RAM:

The MongoDB console provides an easy way to look at the data and index sizes. The db.stats() command will analyse the database and give you a range of statistics. The output is provided in bytes for dataSize and indexSize.

Two things about programming:

1. Nobody really knows how to do it
2. If you think you have a reliable system for doing it, you’re probably doing the computer’s job

Measuring is just the start. The hardest part is figuring out how to apply the data. Julie Zhuo’s talk on How Facebook Uses Data.

Pawned. Gamification getting on your nerves? Sebastian Deterding explains why it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, and may in fact hurt your product/service.

Unlocked. Everything you wanted to know about file locking (or were afraid to find out).

Off The Rails. Web Apps With Rack, Sinatra, Grape, and Siesta, a README.md presentation by Alex Chaffee.