Codetown ::: a software developer's community
I went to OSCON last week. It was even better than ever. There were lots of memorable moments for me this year. I'll try to capture them here, stream of consciousness.
*** Note *** this is a work in progress!
One of the big topics was cloud computing. Openstack was mentioned in many conversations. JQuery, Neo4J, extracting data from social networks, HTML5, Arduino hacks, an informative and funny keynote by Mayor of Portland Sam Adams.
I went to a presentation by Ward Cunningham on wikis and had lunch with him and GatorLUG's Clinton Collins (on the left).
Mark Shuttleworth and I talked for a few minutes. I asked Mark whether he had anything to add to my upcoming JCertif presentation in the Republic of Congo and he said "Tell them Africans will see great changes in their lifetimes and they can be a part of it!"
...please check back as I continue this blog post. Thanks!
Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.
Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.
Check out the Codetown Jobs group.

Sub‑100-ms APIs emerge from disciplined architecture using latency budgets, minimized hops, async fan‑out, layered caching, circuit breakers, and strong observability. But long‑term speed depends on culture, with teams owning p99, monitoring drift, managing thread pools, and treating performance as a shared, continuous responsibility.
By Saranya Vedagiri
Uber engineers detailed how they evolved their storage platform from static rate limiting to a priority-aware load management system. The approach protects Docstore and Schemaless, Uber’s MySQL-based distributed databases, by colocating control with storage, prioritizing critical traffic, and dynamically shedding load under overload conditions.
By Leela Kumili
Continuous learning, adaptability, and strong support networks are the foundations for thriving teams, Matthew Card mentioned. Trust is built through consistent, fair leadership and addressing toxic behaviour, bias, and microaggressions early. By fostering growth, psychological safety, and accountability, people-first leadership drives resilience, collaboration, and performance.
By Ben Linders
Google DeepMind researchers have introduced ATLAS, a set of scaling laws for multilingual language models that formalize how model size, training data volume, and language mixtures interact as the number of supported languages increases.
By Robert Krzaczyński
Moumita Bhattacharya discusses the evolution of Netflix’s ranking systems, from the multi-model architecture to a Unified Contextual Recommender (UniCoRn). She explains how they built a task-agnostic User Foundation Model to capture long-term member preferences. Learn how they solve system challenges like high-throughput inference and the tradeoff between relevance and personalization.
By Moumita Bhattacharya
© 2026 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by
You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!
Join Codetown