Peter McArthur

Two

pile:

We had two major upgrades to Vimeo today.

We completed a marathon data migration that moved all of Vimeo’s backend infrastructure from one data center to another. We’re talking hundreds of millions of rows data that had to be locked, dropped, shipped and restored across the country with complete consistency and zero downtime. Peter busted his ass for weeks setting it up and it went down like clockwork. That was a serious piece of hardcore engineering. We’ve moved from a ragtag group of a few machines to a totally virtualized environment where everything is centrally packaged, pushed, managed and monitored. It opens the door for us to quickly and easily scale up to the next 5 million users and really accelerate performance. If you haven’t already noticed, the embedded Vimeo player loads instantaneously now.

The second upgrade can be found at the bottom of any Vimeo page: we’ve split off from CV and are now our own LLC.

My favorite RSS feeds right now

• Pepys’ Diary is the diary of Samuel Pepys, who acted as a kind of Secretary of the King’s Navy. New entries are posted daily - today’s is from July 6, 1665. The plague started appearing in London during that month. It’s strangely and heavily hyperlinked to annotations and google maps, which appear with modern tube stations, but whose streets are pretty much the same 340 years later.
• FiveThirtyEight.com is a daily recap of all statewide presidential polls (as well as some national and senate polling). It’s well-written with a statistical bent. He weights each day’s polls by historical accuracy & age, running test elections 10,000 times to show a breakdown of all possible outcomes. No more “Newsweek says this, CBS says that.” He’s got Obama winning 308.9 to 229.1.
• Austin Kleon is a writer who draws.

Recommend: Netherland by Joseph O’Neill

Like Bellow with the sound all the way down.