Brion Vibber, Wikipedia CTO talks about Past, Present and Future

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Permalink Reply by Chad Baker on November 2, 2009 at 10:00am

Brion's presentation, "Community performance optimization", loosely compared the concepts of building scalable software to those of building optimized communities (e.g., patch submitters, code committers, content contributors, etc.). As an application grows, we are well-versed at identifying and repairing the bottlenecks of hardware and software. However, as a community grows, we need to get better at providing more effiicent ("optimized") interactions through automation and the effective usage of the right tools.

Brion also made the point that bottlenecks in hardware and software can mean slower performance of an application, adding a few extra seconds or more to the user experience (which can be detrimental, in many circumstances). However, bottlenecks that are human-based can lead to delays of hours, days or even weeks, rendering a user's ability to make progress in their efforts nearly impossible.

To demonstrate how WikiMedia handles these issues, Brion walked us through a few scenarios and described how they've been able to improve user interactions and therby increase the efficiency of their online communities. The slides (with notes) are available on his website at: http://leuksman.com/images/d/dc/WikiSym_2009.pdf

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Permalink Reply by Chad Baker on November 2, 2009 at 10:10am

In addition to the presentation, the group asked a lot of questions about the underlying architecture of Wikipedia. Brion was more than willing to answer any and all questions (they are "open source", after all) and used up every inch of the whiteboard to diagram the concepts. I think we all walked away with the names of a few new tools to research (Squid, memcached, Gitorious).

The only thing I'd mention about this half of the conversation was that we derailed the overall flow of Brion's presentation for a couple of stretches. While the architectural discussion was interesting and very worthwhile, it may have been better to table some of the questions until the end of the meeting.

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