Friday Hacks #42, Feb 22
Posted on by benedict
This week we have Cristobal Viedma and Amarnath Ravikumar, who will share with us on building a web architecture that scales, and design patterns in Drupal respectively. Anyone who is interested should definitely come for the talk!
Date/Time: Friday, February 22 at 6:30pm Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town. Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3M Sign up here: //bit.ly/fridayhacks2013 Free pizza is served before the talks.
Talk 1: Breaking the monolith: Fast distributed web services using sets. (Cristobal Viedma, Head of Platform, Viki)
Talk Description: In the early days of a startup is common to build a monolithic architecture, as time passes by and growth comes, moving to a distributed architecture is unavoidable to scale up with high-availability and good performance.
In this talk we’ll have an overview of how Viki is moving to a distributed architecture and how we leveraged into an in-memory database, Redis, using sets as our main data structure for fast responses.
Talk Prep: During the talk a number of examples using Redis will be given. If the attendee is interested, installing Redis to play as the life examples go might be useful (but not required).
Speaker Profile: Cristobal is the head of platform at Viki, a video site focused on international content and community-driven translations. There, he works with the rest of the engineers supporting different web services and APIs to make sure Viki scales with high-availability and good performance.
During the last few years he worked as a researcher in mobile systems and services, focusing in e-health and context-aware content delivery, in Stockholm. There he also co-organized different developer conferences and events such as SWDC and AndroidOnly.
Prior to this, he started up a company called Bluewalks in the mobile sphere that aimed to help travelers from all walks of life.
Talk 2: Design patterns in Drupal. (Amarnath Ravikumar, NUS Alumni/Teamie Engineer)
Talk Description: Have you ever wondered how your framework of choice has implemented the software design patterns that you have heard and read so much about? I did; so set about fishing for design pattern implementations in the Drupal source code. I must say I was pleasantly surprised. Do stop by to find out more. What? Not sure what design patterns are? Never mind, stop by anyway - it’s never too late to learn: Spoiler: They’re a lot of fun!
Talk Prep: I’d be showing some examples directly from the Drupal code base. It’d be easy to follow along if you have a copy of Drupal 7 on your machine (no need to install). Download from here. Alternatively, you can use the awesome repository viewer on Drupal.org.
Additional code examples at my GitHub repo. Examples are wrapped in a Drupal module. You can learn how to install a Drupal module from here.
Speaker Profile: Amarnath Ravikumar works as an Engineer at Teamie and joined the team in May 2011.
At Teamie, his role is to handle the overall architecture, plan and monitor execution of client projects, developer initiatives and new platform features. Through a six-month attachment at PayPal earlier in 2010, he had led an internal effort to build an automated test suite for localization projects. At PayPal, he was at an excellent vantage point to observe and learn how a high-performing web application is managed and delivered reliably.
Amar graduated in 2011 with a Bachelors in Computer Engineering (Honors) from the National University of Singapore where he was the President of the NUS Student Chapter of the ACM, part of the executive committee of the Electrical and Computer Engineers’ club and an active member playing key roles in other campus student organizations.
An avid Drupal-ist, Amar loves working with small teams to plan, build and ship scalable, high impact web software. More recently, he is excited that one of his Drupal patches made it to Drupal Core (sort of).
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For a map, more details, as well as guidelines on giving a talk on Friday Hacks, see //nushackers.org/fridayhacks/ For more info on NUS Hackers, See: //nushackers.org/about For more Friday Hacks talks: //nushackers.org/