PB's quick fix of a corrupted hard drive showed the importance of email and Gmail's invite system was a necessity, not a genius growth hack.
People were shocked to see PB grab a screwdriver and go to the server room to fix a corrupted hard drive, realizing how important email is and how it must always work perfectly.
Gmail's invite system was a necessity due to lack of server space, not a genius growth hack.
Facebook overcame the challenge of scaling from a single user's table to hundreds of millions of people by writing code to bounce between schools and building a global user's table.
Startup founders used to have to physically drive to data centers to reboot servers when their sites crashed.
The new neighbor in the data center was Facebook, with janky servers labeled with the names of universities, one of which was Stanford.
Facebook scaled by having a separate php instance, my sequel server, and memcache instance for each school.
Facebook overcame the challenge of scaling from a single user's table to hundreds of millions of people by writing code to bounce between schools and building a global user's table.
Kyle and Emmitt developed an algorithm to propagate a stream across multiple video servers to handle high traffic, resulting in a few seconds delay for viewers.
Engineering a live video product to handle 20x more traffic than normal is difficult, but can be done with the right hacks.
Kyle and Emmitt worked together to figure out how to cache parts of the page, making some parts dynamic and others static, to handle high traffic.
Friendster was trying to hire engineers to run MySQL threads, while MySpace used a "do things that don't scale" solution to show users their extended network.
We developed an algorithm to propagate a stream across multiple video servers to serve all viewers, and to spin up more video servers as the stream's traffic grows.
A website communicated the number of viewers to the video system, allowing it to pre-populate the stream to the necessary video servers, resulting in a delay of a few seconds for viewers.
Create a free peering relationship with ISPs to save money, and use a website to get free translations from your community.
You can connect to servers and save money by creating a free peering relationship with some ISPs.
An ISP was blocking free video streaming, so a website in San Francisco put up a message blocking the video and providing a phone number and email address, which worked quickly.
We got translations for our product for free by creating a website where our community could volunteer to translate strings into their local language.