Category Archives: craigslist
Life after The List
One week ago today was my last day as a Craigslist employee. After a 15+ year adventure involving Perl, MySQL, Linux, MongoDB, Sphinx / Manticore, and various other homegrown and open source technologies, I decided it was time to take … Continue reading
Posted in craigslist
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GNU Parallel and Block Size(s)
I’ve been a fan of GNU Parallel for a while but until recently have only used it occasionally. That’s a shame, because it’s often the simplest solution for quickly solving embarrassingly parallel problems. My recent usage of it has centered … Continue reading
Posted in craigslist, mysql, programming, tech
8 Comments
Today’s lame sales pitch…
I’m going to paste the full text of an email message that recently landed in my inbox and unfortunately wasn’t tagged as spam. But I won’t paste it in one blob, I’ll do it piece by piece so it is … Continue reading
Posted in craigslist, misc, Uncategorized, wtf
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How to write a good used car ad…
For the last few weeks I’ve been shopping on-line for a new (to us) used car. And in the process of doing so, I’ve looked at hundreds of ads for cars within a 2-3 hour driving distance of our home … Continue reading
Posted in craigslist
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Speaking at OpenWest 2014 Conference: real-time search infrastructure architecture at craigslist
Just a quick heads-up that I’ll be giving a 50 minute talk at OpenWest in Utah on Thursday, May 8th. The talk is titled real-time search infrastructure architecture at craigslist and is completely new. We’ve recently completed the 3 major … Continue reading
Posted in craigslist, sphinx
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Seeking Sucks: Spoiled by SSDs
I’m in the process of rebuilding full-text indexes for a good sized document collection that lives in a sharded MongoDB cluster. And the funny thing about this is that I don’t really use MongoDB that much. I mean we put … Continue reading
Posted in craigslist, mongodb, nosql, sphinx, tech
10 Comments
Handling Database Failover at Craigslist
There has been some interesting discussion on-line recently about how to handle database (meaning MySQL, but really it applies to other systems too) failover. The discussion that I’ve followed so far, in order, is: GitHub’s report on their automated failover … Continue reading
Posted in craigslist, mysql, tech, yahoo
12 Comments
magit makes git awesome in emacs
I recently came across the Meet Magit video which is an excellent introduction to the magit emacs mode for git. I use both Emacs and Git a lot at work and at home, so having something a bit more comprehensive … Continue reading
Posted in craigslist, programming
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craigslist Charitable Fund Donates to the Perl Foundation
I’m very happy to see the announcement on the Perl Foundations’s home page this morning. According to craigslist CEO and former Perl Hacker Jim Buckmaster, “craigslist has gloried in and relied upon Perl for most of its software development for more than … Continue reading
Posted in craigslist, perl
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Experimenting with Real-Time Search using Sphinx
In the last few weeks I’ve been experimenting with using real-time indexes in Sphinx to allow full-text searching of data recently added to craigslist. While this posting is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to what I’ve implemented (that … Continue reading
Posted in craigslist, sphinx, tech
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Jeremy Zawodny's blog 