fieldnotes

1. January 25th, 2010
   aweissman

   

   gbattle:

   The original MTV fish tank in the betaworks offices. Those appear to be Neon Tetras if my tropical fish knowledge serves me correctly.

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2. January 18th, 2010
   neilw

   Lead Developer wanted for Twitterfeed (betaworks)

   Twitterfeed is looking for a lead engineer to work with our distributed team and to take control of the roadmap, architect new features, and implement availability and performance guarantees.
   
   Twitterfeed is by far the largest publisher to Twitter, with almost 500,000 users pushing 800,000 feeds to Twitter. When the web is changing from a place where you find content to where content finds you, Twitterfeed is well placed to do great things in this space. Twitterfeed is part of betaworks, the team behind Summize (acquired by Twitter), bit.ly, Tweetdeck and chartbeat.
   
   We’re looking for
   
   + experienced web developer
   + strong experience with dynamic languages (python, ruby, etc) and web
   frameworks (django, rails, etc)
   + expertise at managing mysql, legacy data models, and schema migration
   + experience ensuring mysql availability and redundancy -
   multi-master, mmm, replication, partitioning, drdb, etc.
   + know how to properly normalize a data model as well as when to denormalize
   + strong unix/linux background
   + conversant in html/css/javascript
   + experience with non-relational data stores (mongo, tokyo, etc)
   + experience with asynchronous processing and message queues
   (rabbitmq, gearman, starling, etc)
   + experience with caching infrastructure (nginx, varnish, squid, etc)
   
   obsessions:
   + performance
   + caching
   + availability
   + measurement
   
   
   a resume is helpful but would love a link to your blog and linkedin profile.
   
   Tony Haile
   email tony (at) betaworks (dot) com

   Comments (View) | Tags: jobs
3. December 21st, 2009
   rafer

   “There is the possibility that a true musical underground, in the archaic sense, could only really exist if it was offline. But that seems utterly beyond imagining, doesn’t it?

   Simon Reynolds (via newspeedwayboogie)

   Rafer sez:
   It is beyond imagining, but it’s also unnecessary. Underground culture movements are a restricted accessed system like any other. The ‘net does that well. It’s what invites, registration, and passwords are for. I heard some smart guys invested in something analogous called Ideeli.

   

   Comments (View) | Tags: Simon Reynolds
4. December 15th, 2009
   aweissman

   “History doesn’t mean shit and the great companies always emerge from completely orthogonal plays on what all the smart people predict will happen.

   Jeff Nolan, Venture Chronicles

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5. November 23rd, 2009
   aweissman

   “In a discussion about the importance of distribution, some start-up guys – each the creators of new enterprises that took off like gun shots – were asked by a representative of the big, old club which company they would most want to do distribution deals with. The start-up guys cocked their heads like confused puppies. Why would we want to do that? they asked.

   Jeff Jarvis

   ie, no business development

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6. November 22nd, 2009
   aweissman

   “Advertising, like tourism, tends to kill the thing it loves over time because it suffers from tragedy of the commons effects … and its usual response to the lessening impact of Ads is to increase the volume. Which upsets more people….

   Alan Patrick

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7. November 22nd, 2009
   aweissman

   “Our blogs are already affiliated-linked up to the eyeballs, our TV shows are product-placed to hell, radio has succumbed to payola, even our schools are brought to you by the letters COCA COL and A. Human conversation is the last area of communication to hold out against the relentless march of commercialisation and it’s our duty, as humans, to make sure it stays that way. So, screw consensus. And shame on me for starting to lean towards it yesterday. Give me ad-free conversation, or give me death.

   Paul Carr

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8. November 19th, 2009
   dshen

   

   Check out pictures from our annual Betaday09!

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9. October 26th, 2009
   jessicalynn

   Looking for a Flash Developer

   betaworks is looking for a Flash Developer for some contract work.  Please email jessica @ betaworks.com.

   Comments (View) | Tags: jobs
10. October 14th, 2009
    aweissman

    “Existing search engines (which thought of themselves as portals) believed that search quality wasn’t very important (regular people can’t tell the difference), and that search wasn’t very valuable anyway, since it sends people away from your site. Google’s success came in large part from recognizing that others were wrong on both points.

    Paul Buchheit, Applied Philosophy, a.k.a. “Hacking”

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