

Memcached turns 10 years old today - AndrewDucker
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/gimme-the-cache-memcached-turns-10-years-old-today/

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staunch
Brad Fitzpatrick is one of the most interesting programmers to watch. He's
written a dozen _really_ interesting and useful pieces of code. Whatever he's
working on is probably worth your attention. Right now he's working on Go at
Google.

<https://github.com/bradfitz>

<https://twitter.com/bradfitz>

~~~
atomicstack
Yes, another of his inventions (or something he was at least involved in
implementing) is Gearman (<http://gearman.org/>), a queue/worker system which
I used in my last job at a domain registrar/web host to hack up parallelised
domain name look-ups. Similar to memcached, it was ridiculously quick and easy
to set up and use, and bought me massive efficiency gains with very little
implementation cost.

~~~
icelancer
Whoa, he did gearman? That's awesome. I had no idea.

~~~
sneak
He also invented and prototyped OpenID.

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look_lookatme
I followed Brad on LJ around this time, a time before I learned to program but
was into running Linux/FreeBSD on my desktop and taking multiple unsuccessful
stabs at building things. I remember his post about memcached:

<http://brad.livejournal.com/1893677.html>

I didn't really know what he was talking about but it was really fascinating
and inspiring (as a lot of his tech posts were).

~~~
gpcz
It's interesting to see that the idea came to him while taking a shower,
similar to Clifford Stoll's "Operation Showerhead" idea that took down Markus
Hess. I wonder how many of the world's most important inventions were thought
up in a shower...

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smcnally
This conversation came up within the last week, though I forget where: Rather
than being "thought up" in the shower, the shower is more likely the place
where the idea seeps into the conscious mind. We're generally in the shower
after a night's sleep. During that sleep, we're working through thoughts,
ideas, problems. Before we can make use of that processing work, we need it to
be accessible to the waking mind. The shower is a place that wakening happens
frequently.

~~~
laumars
Sometimes it's a case of ideas popping into our heads when we've relaxed our
minds from the problem. eg Some of my best ideas come to my while I'm on the
toilet because I can be staring at a piece of code for hours and not find the
fault. But the act of walking away from the problem and relaxing my brain for
a few minutes is sometimes all that's needed to see the problem from another
angle (and thus stumble onto the solution).

It's the same reason that I used to have a bath whenever I'd get stuck on a
college assignment.

~~~
thejosh
Absolutely! Taking 5 minutes away from a problem can bring to light the
solution when you're not trying to "bruteforce" the solution in your head.

Same as sometimes when driving as I'm not focused on work can bring about good
ideas.

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samworm
Memcached actually turns 10 tomorrow - Wed 22nd.

I consider memcached to be one of the most important programs of recent time,
it has been a core component for almost every large scale website you can
think of. Ubiquity isn't always synonymous with quality, but in this case it
clearly is.

Its incredibly powerful and very easy to deploy. A great piece of work, one
that has saved my sanity many times, and congratulations to all involved.

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nvr219
I miss LiveJournal so much. I was so reluctant to leave it but with all my irl
friends migrating to Friendster and then myspace I had no choice. Privacy
settings were easy, friend management was easy, desktop client was easy (and
powerful). RIP

-quasidan

~~~
Legion
I agree with this a lot. LJ by its nature encouraged writing, not just status
updates. It was a much more interesting - if sometimes drama-filled - read
than my Facebook news feed is with many of the same people.

Also, LJ groups have not been successfully replicated by any of the other
major social media networks.

~~~
jseliger
_LJ by its nature encouraged writing_

Wordpress does the same, which is why I primarily use it and not the
innumerable alternatives.

I think the desire to do long-form writing, especially regularly, is a
relatively rare one, which is why we see most people migrating to sites that
mostly do images / sound bites / etc.

But the people who _do_ do long-form writing will probably always be with us
and probably always need tools appropriate to that genre. I don't know much
about the history of LJ or why /how Wordpress supplanted it for long-form
writers, but I do know that WP works pretty well for me, or at least well
enough that I haven't seen any alternatives good enough to consider switching.

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alexpopescu
I'm always impressed how such _obvious_ tools (e.g. memcached, junit) can
change the face of software development.

Do you have similar other _obvious_ ones in mind? (please no rails :-)

~~~
fosap
Git, or in general distributed VC.

Not obvious to implement. But the concept was obvious.

~~~
jlgreco
Even if DVC lacked the D, the concept of versions being a DAG was an
incredibly important. A very big improvement to how classical CVS systems have
developers think about history.

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stock_toaster
I must say, the best thing to happen to memcached since memcached has been (in
my experience) twemproxy[1].

We ($dayjob) have been using it in production and it has been _solid_.
twemproxy is quality engineering.

[1]: <https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy>

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atomicstack
The other thing that nobody seems to have brought up is the forks, descendants
and similar pieces of software it inspired in one way or another: e.g.
memcachedb, Tokyo Cabinet, Redis, etc. Memcached's release was very much a
watershed moment.

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NamTaf
Here is the canonical presentation about Brad's fun with scaling Livejournal
(including memcached). It's still a good read even now if you want an
introduction to the whole topic:

<http://www.danga.com/words/2005_oscon/oscon-2005.pdf>

edit: Think about the number of decade-old pieces of software still used
almost universally because they're still one of the most effective solutions
in their field. That is what makes me appreciate memcached most of all.

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swah
Apparently the first version was in Perl - did Brad himself rewrite it?

~~~
anatoly
I wrote most of the initial C server. Brad helped with code reviews, some bug-
hunting, and IIRC he wrote the first version of the slab allocator. Prior to
using the slab allocator, we tried straightforward malloc (thrashed under load
due to fragmentation) and Judy arrays (didn't scale).

Brad handled the Perl client (initially the only client), and I think we
hashed out the protocol together. I was an employee at LiveJournal at the
time.

(I want to emphasize that the credit for the _idea_ of memcached belongs 100%
to Brad)

~~~
evmar
Anatoly is too modest to say it, but he deserves credit for being the author
of memcached as people know it today. Which isn't to say Brad stole the credit
or anything like that, but rather to note most successful projects involve
more than one person.

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jchrisa
Memcached is the ancestor of the front end for Couchbase, so while we
regularly come in as one of the most consistently fast NoSQL databases, we
can't take complete credit for that (other than picking a great foundation).

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thelarry
Such a great, stable, and easy to use product. Keep it simple and reliable.

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bajitos
Btw, did anyone else too think of Gimme the cash! when seeing this story
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY_aOtFAcO4>

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bajitos
Kudos for creating and maintaining one of the most important pieces of
software used on the Web today!

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kondro
This makes me feel old.

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frankwiles
Now I feel old. :(

