In an hour or so I will be making my way to Dulles International en route to Jo’burg, just as the weather in Washington starts to turn kak. I have had a wonderful couple of weeks in the States and it has been hugely beneficial from a work perspective (that one’s for you Ray). Anyone who thinks the U.S is not worth visiting doesn’t know what they are talking about or are in need of having their prejudice levels checked. This place is great.

On the other hand, I am looking forward to returning to SA and all the third world that comes with it; I guess it’s just home. I am expecting to get back to stacks of work and chaos in the office (Ray has been documenting this quite nicely on wildfrontier).

What lies around the corner it very exciting and makes it all worthwhile so I’ll probably have a lot to say about all of this in the upcoming months.

I am concerned about airport security in the U.S. Yes, you heard me right, I don’t think it’s nearly thorough enough and I feel unsafe. I’d like someone to explain to me how I was able to pass through, unnoticed, with my lightsaber (pictured above) and bring it onto a flight in my hand luggage from San Francisco to Washington D.C (like the capital or something)?

Sure – there were security checks – but the officers seemed more concerned with smelling my shoes and squeezing the life out of my brand-new tube of toothpaste than the stench of the dangerous weapon of mass destruction in my suitcase. I find this utterly unacceptable when the terror alert level is at Orange!

This is also worrying on many other levels. Firstly, has security not been trained to identify a real-McCoy lightsaber or ask whether I am trained in the skills of the Jedi? Placed in the wrong hands (i.e terrorist = not me), a lighsaber has the potential to become a weapon capable of unthinkable carnage. If you don’t believe me, ask Darth Vader, he had his hand cut off by one of the buggers!!!

Secondly, why is it necessary to humiliate passengers by strictly enforcing the use of plastic cutlery on flights when all a terrorist would need to do it smuggle a lightsaber through a security check point whilst they continue to concern themselves with the anal probe they’re conducting instead of worrying about who’s packing “real” heat?

I sincerely hope that the concern I have just raised will not be construed as a hoax or a “funny, funny”. We need to start getting intelligent about security in the 21st Century and realise that the next catastrophe is only one flick of a pure energy beam away!

On a less serious note, read Schnitz’s account of our trip to Washington so far!

View my Washington D.C Photo Set

Presented by: Owen Byrne (Senior Software Engineer: Digg)

We are made up of a passionate community

Editors and reporters troll the digg homepage

Digg is readily adaptable to other content

1M + users
10M+ pages per day
15M+ Unique visitors per day
100+ servers

The “Digg Effect” has replaced the “Slashdot Effect” in the 21C

How Digg got started and grew

Developed a project spec:
Open source technologies — LAMP
Basic utilitarian design
$99/mo. Hosting

Feature Decisions

Innovation — Avoid too many features
Simple and rewarding — one click (dig, bury, #1)
Used “Ajax: where it made sense
Tools to connect to other sites (blog this, javascript widget)
Experiment: Spy, “cloud view”, visualizations (stack, swarm)

Pre-Funding (Dec ’04 — Mar ’05)

Monitoring is “someone is working on the site most of the time”
Standard LAMP architecture
Growth constrained by hardware

Growth

Paris Hilton!
Word of mouth, PR, minimal advertising, Kevin Rose

Problems

Log files
myIsam bad, innoDB good
MySQL full-text search doesn’t scale
Javascript compression

Seed Funding Investment

Kevin Rose managed to get funding to purchase a number of servers in May ‘04
Ad-hoc monitoring
One dedicated operations person

Series A Investment

$100k on servers and spares
Everyone in the same location
Operations department (currently four people)
Hire senior developers

Digg Architecture

LAMP + memcached
MySQL 5, innodb
Lucene full-text search
Digg 1.0 (Dec. 2004)
Digg 2.0 (July 2005)
Digg 3.0 (July 2006)
All software is Open Source

Conclusion

Engage with your users
Don’t forget about the business model
Be frugal — there’s always an element of luck
Think about scaling early

View my San Francisco Photo Set