Author Archives: Jeremy Zawodny

About Jeremy Zawodny

I'm a software engineer and pilot. I work at craigslist by day, hacking on various bits of back-end software and data systems. As a pilot, I fly Glastar N97BM, Just AirCraft SuperSTOL N119AM, Bonanza N200TE, and high performance gliders in the northern California and Nevada area. I'm also the original author of "High Performance MySQL" published by O'Reilly Media. I still speak at conferences and user groups on occasion.

N722VJ Air to Air Photos

Posted on June 14, 2011 by Jeremy Zawodny

This gallery contains 18 photos.

More Galleries | Tagged flying | 1 Comment

I actually tried learning Rails

Posted on June 13, 2011 by Jeremy Zawodny

A few months back I wanted to prototype some ideas that my wife and I have been tossing around for web sites that’d be fun to build up in our so-called spare time. I thought it would be smart to … Continue reading →

Posted in perl, programming | 29 Comments

Video from my MongoSF 2011 Talk

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Jeremy Zawodny

To go along with the Slides from my MongoSF 2011 Talk, the video is now on-line thanks to 10gen. I had a great time at MongoSF 2011, learned some important new things about MongoDB and got a sense of just how … Continue reading →

Posted in craigslist, mongodb, nosql | 1 Comment

Slides from my MongoSF 2011 Talk

Posted on May 26, 2011 by Jeremy Zawodny

Due to a surprisingly long conversion delay, the slides from my talk at MongoSF 2011 are now available: I’m sure video will be available at some point too, which will make the slides quite a bit more useful. But if … Continue reading →

Posted in craigslist, mongodb | 5 Comments

Speaking at MongoSF on May 24th

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Jeremy Zawodny

I’m a little late to be posting this the night before. In any case, tomorrow afternoon I’ll be presenting at MongoSF 2011. My talk title is Lessons Learned from Migrating 2+ Billion Documents at Craigslist and it picks up where my … Continue reading →

Posted in craigslist, mongodb, nosql | 2 Comments

Building a GrowCamp Greenhouse

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Jeremy Zawodny

This past weekend we finally assembled the 4’x8′ GrowCamp greenhouse that we bought form Costco online about a year ago. We’re hoping to grow an assortment of tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and other veggies in an environment that’s safe from deer … Continue reading →

Posted in cooking | 6 Comments

Perl, MD5, and Unicode

Posted on April 28, 2011 by Jeremy Zawodny

Pro Tip: Perl’s Digest::MD5 hates Unicode (and so should you). Here’s what I recently learned from perldoc Digest::MD5 recently (the hard way, of course): Perl 5.8 support Unicode characters in strings. Since the MD5 algorithm is only defined for strings … Continue reading →

Posted in perl, programming | 9 Comments

Databases 10 Years Ago

Posted on April 11, 2011 by Jeremy Zawodny

In preparation for the talk I’m giving tomorrow, I was assembling a slide that looks back about 10 years ago and remembering what our database infrastructure was like back then. I was at Yahoo! during that time and our leading-edge … Continue reading →

Posted in mysql, tech | 3 Comments

MongoDB Pre-Splitting for Faster Data Loading and Importing

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Jeremy Zawodny

Once nice thing about playing with Webdis is that I can watch the import rate of my multi-billion document MongoDB import in nearly real-time. The downside of that is that I quickly found that once I got a few hundred … Continue reading →

Posted in craigslist, mongodb, programming, tech | 27 Comments

Finally Learning Python using Google’s Videos

Posted on March 1, 2011 by Jeremy Zawodny

Back in 2006 I asked which language I should learn next: Ruby or Python. Well, I finally got around to feeding my brain a bit. I recently discovered Google’s Python Class and have watched the first few videos. So far … Continue reading →

Posted in programming, python, tech | 8 Comments