PERSPECTIVE: Magento, the awesome slow eCommerce Platform!

Magento is cool! it’s getting a lot of traction and popularity. It is getting better with every release, and it’s definitely empowering thousands of on-line stores world-wide. No question about that! However, I believe there is something intrinsically wrong with Magento! Magento, from my experience, is most of the time  is below customers and technologist … Continue reading PERSPECTIVE: Magento, the awesome slow eCommerce Platform!

REVIEW: Building Scalable Systems – an Asynchronous Approach

A very interesting presentation about using asynchronous messaging systems in scaling up applications. The presentation is split into main parts. The first part is a quick rant to cut some crap related to application scaling according to the presenter. These include: Big data do not really exist Sharded RDBMS offer better scalability than NoSQL. So big data is … Continue reading REVIEW: Building Scalable Systems – an Asynchronous Approach

QUOTATION: Overcome Machine-Induced Self-Denial

You can avoid machine-induced self-denial by building a “shared- nothing” architecture. Where that is impractical, apply decoupling middleware to reduce the impact of excessive demand, or make the shared resource itself horizontally scal- able through redundancy and a backside synchronization protocol. You can also design a fallback mode for the system to use when the … Continue reading QUOTATION: Overcome Machine-Induced Self-Denial

REPHRASE: Zero Investment SOA

In contrary to the prevailing belief that implementing SOA needs a big investment ahead, this presentation illustrates the process of implementing SOA in small/cost-effective iterations. According to the presentation, SOA can be implemented similar to Agile development with one difference. Agile focuses on incremental implementation, while Zero Investment SOA is implemented  as  incremental deliveries, where … Continue reading REPHRASE: Zero Investment SOA

Quotation: System Integration Points

Integration points are the number-one killer of systems. Every single one of those feeds presents a stability risk. Every socket, process, pipe or remote procedure call can and will hang. Even database calls can hang, in ways obvious and subtle. Every feed into the system can hang it, crash it or generate other impulses at … Continue reading Quotation: System Integration Points

REPHRASE: Scale at Facebook

Aditya Agarwal, Director of engineering at facebook, gave a very interesting presentation in May 28th at QCon illustrating Facebook architecture. Aditya stressed on making it quickly to the market and not to over engineer. “Scalability is a good problem to have” as stated by Aditya. Statistics: 1. users spend 8 billion a minute per day … Continue reading REPHRASE: Scale at Facebook

EVENT: Presentation at University of Jordan

Below  the presentation I gave today at the university of Jordan as part of the Open Source Technological Week, the presentation illustrates “where does the time go?” between typing a URL in the address bar till the page is completely rendered. The purpose of this presentation is to understand where and how the time is … Continue reading EVENT: Presentation at University of Jordan

REVIEW: Web 2.0 Architectures

  Good for web entrepreneurs . It illustrates the main concepts and patterns of web 2.0.  No real technical value. The first four chapters clarify a lot of concepts and terminologies in Web 2.0 context. I believe the word “architecture” is misleading. “patterns” is more suitable. bottom line, I did not find it interesting. Very … Continue reading REVIEW: Web 2.0 Architectures