QCon is a conference focusing on 19 different tracks. Some to mention: Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About, Software Craftsmanship, Functional programming,  Irresponsible Architectures and Unusual Architects,  Pragmatic Cloud Computing, Agile Evolution, How do you test that? and Browser as a Platform. I attended to one or two talks from almost every track except .Net and Java oriented ones. Keynotes from Dan Ingalls (Forty Years of Fun with Computers), Ralph Johnson (Living and working with aging software) and Robert Martin, aka Uncle Bob (Bad Code, Craftsmanship, Engineering, and Certification) were inspring.

I also got the chance to chat with Dan Ingalls (principal architect of five generations of Smalltalk). I asked him if he follows a method while working (like Pomodore that Dan North recommended in his “Simplicity – the way of the unusual architect” talk). Hopefully, we share a similar characteristic: we can’t work if we don’t like the job but when we like it, we can’t stop working from morning till night.  He recommended me to go where I think I would have the most fun. If something bothers you, it is ok: “If it’s hot, it is hot. If it’s not, it is not!” There’s always something to do when you can’t work; empty the rubbish or wash the dishes. And when you concentrate, start to work again -but know yourself very well.

Me and Dan Ingalls

We also talked about the lack of women in computing. He shared some of his observations; for example in a conference about Wikipedia, he observed there are almost same number of women and men. But when it comes to more technical and less social conferences and events, there are really very few women participating. He also added maybe there’s a genetic factor about this. He has two boys who cannot stop being “boys” –always breaking/fixing things but in fact, that’s what all about the computers!

There are lots of ideas and keys to share, here are some main ideas:

From Uncle Bob’s keynote (slides are available here):

• Follow the Boy Scout rule: Always leave things a little better than you find.
• Methods should be less than 20 lines.
• Don’t have a function that takes a boolean. It is clear that it does two things; one if its false, another if its true.
• Cut/Paste is bug replication
• Extract until you drop! Keep extracting until all functions only do one thing
• Source code represent the design -not the UML tools.

Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About was one of the tracks I wondered about =] Some gems from (Facebook: Architecture and Design) by Aditya Agarwal (Director of Engineering at Facebook):

• Services of philosophy: choose the tool for the right task. They use Thrift, a lightweight software framework for cross-language development (C++, PHP, Python, Ruby, Erlang, Haskell, etc.)
• Most important thing in their engineering team: How quickly can you move?
  

Agarwal said despite being a small team (over 1 million active users per engineer) they do great because of the Facebook culture. There are three very important things in FB:

• Move fast and break things
• Huge impact with small teams
• Be bold and innovate
  

Agarwal also gave some important tips for MySQL. They have about 6k server-years of runtime experience without data loss or corruption (can you believe it?!) Here are my notes:

• Don’t ever store non-static data in a central database
• Data driven schemas make for happy programmers and difficult operations.
• Logical migration of data is very difficult. Create a large number of logical databases, load balance them over varying number of physical nodes.

There are 1,200,000 photo requests a second in Facebook and scaling takes iteration. They serve 20 billion photos in 4 resolutions =  80 billion photos (which would wrap around the earth more then 10 times!)

• They use cachr: cache the high volume smaller images to offload the main storage systems, and only cache 300 million images in 3 resolutions. Then disribute these through a CDN to reduce network latency

There are 400 million unique home pages and 50 million operations per second in Facebook. They have a love-hate relationship with memcache; it is easy to corrupt and has a limited data model. But it is simply crucial and it does what it does, really good.

At the end of the talk, I asked to Agarwal about their operating system choice and he told me they are probably  going to use Centos.

One of the most interesting talks was Building Skype. Learnings from almost five years as a Skype Architect by Andres Kütt (architect of Skype). First, some stats:

• There are about 650 employees at Skype (which makes 800k users per employee)
• 27.2 billion minutes of Skype to Skype calling per quarter.
• 210k minutes of calls each minute (71k contains video)

Points Kütt made:

• Rules of thumb does not apply: It is always tempting to use patterns that have worked previously but they should be used as a starting point for discussion – not as a solution.
• Functional architecture is important. You neglect how the functionality of your system is organized at your own peril.
• Simply things work. The simplier things are the more intelligent they are.
• Buzz words are dangerous: They are both dangerous as carriers of meaningless chance but also as a catalyst for breaking down relationships.
• Architecture needs to fit your organization. There’s no such thing as a beautiful system design. The design either fits what your organization needs or it doesn’t.

Dan Ingalls keynote was very entertaining. He showed his early codes and he made all the demonstration in Squeak and also shared demonstrations of lively kernel. One wise quote from Ingalls talk:

We’re bad at learning the lessons from the past because:

I have a lot more notes in my Moleskine but I need to take some time to transfer them into the blog.

I also had the chance to visit the gorgeous O’Reilly stand and buy some books (I even have Erlang Programming and 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know signed by the authors!)

I had a great time and I look forward to being back the next time. Thanks to Google, again!

In fact, component based frameworks for collecting together data input/output, pre-processing, classification, clustering, regression and visualization schemes and alike have been implemented before in various languages, for use on different platforms, and operated on a variety of data formats. But unfortunately, due to platform depended solutions, it is difficult to try out and compare different machine learning algorithms quickly and easily.

Hopefully, with ML-LAB will provide a sophisticated and easy-to-use wireable interface for creating the workflow. You can upload a dataset, and put a classification algorithm (currently supports K-NN, Naive Bayes and ID3) after it, then wire it to a dimensionality reduction algorithm (PCA, LDA or Isomap), and if you want to, you can wire the results to another algorithm, … It has no connection limits, you can create a workflow with a hundred connections for a single dataset.

The collection of machine learning algorithms are purely implemented in Python and Django is used for interface and matplotlib for the graphics. I’m sharing some screenshots of it, you’ll notice it looks like Yahoo! Pipes a lot. Hopefully, it will be online at www.ml-lab.com after the core library finished.

You can follow ML-Lab on twitter! http://twitter.com/ml_lab

Hopefully, the application process is over and the only thing to do now is a long wait. I would like to thank to Suzan Uskudarli, Arman Aksoy, Sarp Centel, Duygu Ozpolat and Elif Surer for their help on my S.O.P.

I created a wordle cloud from my statement of purpose for Carnegie Mellon. The distribution of the topics seems fine ;) (click on the image to see larger version).

Note: Wordle is a powerful and fancy tool for creating word clouds. –> Wordle.net

Fortunately, the reason for leaving my job leads me closer to my dreams: I have been selected as a Fulbright Ph.D. fellow and hopefully, I am going to continue my education in USA next year. As I am currently doing my master degree at Computer Engineering Department, Bogazici University, I had to give my full energy and time to finish my education in Turkey, so I decided to contribute Pardus as a non-TUBITAK employee. >>

Therefore, I will continue my career in Perceptual Intelligence Lab. at Bogazici University and continue work on my master thesis with Prof. Ethem Alpaydin on Machine Learning.

I also would like to thank to all of my colleagues who supported me to apply for Fulbright fellowship and to take the right decisions for my career. Everything is gonna be awesome! =]

* From The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Last week I attended to Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit at Googleplex, Mountain View. It was definitely one of the best time I had in recent years. First of all, thanks to Leslie, Ellen, Cat, Chris DiBona and Google Open Source program office and everyone who made this happen (I should also thank to Sam Lantinga (writer of SDL) who let me to use his travel stipend.)

My adventure started at Los Angeles; thanks to my Google Summer of Code t-shirt, I met with Fridrich (from Go OpenOffice project) at Los Angeles and we made all way to Sunnyvale from San Francisco with Thorsten (also from Go-OO). After travelling for 20 hours, I went to the opening party at Wild Palms on Friday. It was really nice to see some familiar faces from last year’s summit; Donnie Berkholz (Gentoo), Sam Lantinga (SDL), Selena Deckelmann (PostgreSQL), Jacob Appelbaum (Tor), Gary (Pidgin), Marty (Etherboot) and many others that I cannot name now.

Women in Open Source session (bottom + left)

On Saturday, the sessions got started and everybody who wanted to lead a session wrote their ideas and proposed them for vote: the more people add badges to your session, the bigger conference room you get. I proposed a session; Reversing the Trend: Women in Open Source and hopefully, there was quite a lot interest for the session and I found the chance to lead it at the biggest conference room, Tunis. There were really interesting ideas and experiences about the topic and we continued the session on Sunday, too. (I will write about the session and share the notes and thoughts in another blog post, soon.)

Photo by John ‘Warthog9′ Hawley.

When I got tired of participating to technical sessions, I spent some time at Casablanca session :) Casablanca is a room with full of Play-dohs, toys and this kind of things (as appears in the picture above) and it’s for discussing things while playing with toys =)

Also I should mention Sam’s Solar System session, which we discussed solar system and astronomy applications under Linux and examined some stars and build a solar system with play-dohs for Sam’s daughter =)

During the summit I had the chance to meet with awesome people (I wish I could mention all of them, but thanks to jet-lag!), Ryan and Lionel (GNOME \m/), Alistair and Erik (WorldForge), Jason (Limesurvey), Lydia and Leo (KDE), Jon, Josh and his wonderful wife Erin (Inkscape) and Nicolas (GIMP) and many others.

After two days of hacking, summit ended on Sunday and we took the traditional group photo together:

Photo by John ‘Warthog9′ Hawley.

I really appreciate to Leslie and other Googlers who made me to have that awesome time.

Also thanks to everyone who participated to write Google Summer of Code Mentoring Guide, so we can read the fraking manual instead of asking the same questions to Leslie. ;)

I also had awesome time after the summit with Lionel, Ryan and Jason. Maybe I can write about that trip later, but here’s our awesome photo with Android and its releases: cupcake, donut and eclair. \m/

Note: This is the Beta release for Kaptan 4. Design (graphics, colors, layouts) can change until Pardus 2009 stable release (30 days to launch! \m/)

Kaptan4 looks like Kaptan3 but it is fully written in Qt4 and Python. As always, comments are appreciated :)

More screenshots ->

• A couple of days ago, I got the following e-mail from Google Diversity Team that was saying I am one of six award winners to attend linux.conf.au:

  Thank you for your application to the Google-Linux.conf.au Diversity Delegates Programme. After careful review by a committee made up of Linux.conf.au organizers, Linux Chix, and representatives from Google – your application has been selected as one of the 6 award winners!

  I had a list of talks in mind to attend @linux.conf.au. But unfortunately, it seems I can hardly get the visa on time (remember the MySQL case -and other side of the coin.. *click*)

  Wonderful news.. but,.. well.. just news. =)

• * It’s 19th of Jan. but I forgot to tell you Project 366 was succesfully finished! I started Project 366 just for want of trying, but lately it became a long-year album. I see how Photojojo was right. It’s an amazing way to document travels and accomplishments, relationships, .. and so on. Time moves surprisingly fast.

  Btw, i made a video from all Project 366 photos:

  
  Project 366 (2008) from Pinar on Vimeo.

• I have some supercalifragilisticexpialidocious plans about school, ah.. frak school.
• And at last, I started to use KDE4 on my daily system, but it’s more like a mutant (using Nautilus as a file manager is enough?)

Since I successfully unlocked & signed into my Google account last week (it was only one step further: an edge or 3g connection! :)), I am happly using Android. It has nice features and geeky enough–except it rapidly drains battery (i turned brightness down to 0% as a workaround, but still sucks).

I am currently writing this entry via its browser. But I get bored.. Let’s be a bad girl ;P

*pinar hits enter*
*pinar types “reboot” to address bar*
*pinar hits enter*
…………………………………………………………………………….

Wha? What happened? Why my phone restarted? Aww, did it evaluate everything i write as a system command? I must kiddin’, huh? :)

But unfortunately, I’m not kiddin’… It is really the most bizarre flaw I’ve ever seen.. You can read more from here.

PS#1: Note that, only Android 1.0 TC5-RC29 or earlier are vulnerable and a patch has released already.
PS#2: Don’t even try to type “rm -rf /” :P
PS#3: Oh, and there’s that, too.
PS#4: Aomm, and there was that, too.

- Uhmm.., you’re working for Microsoft?
+ Yes, we are.
- Oh, I’ve just attended to a summit in Google. Actually.. I am working for a Linux distribution.

Then we started to laugh.. and some kind of funny fan stuff. Then it went like that:

+ So what are you doing exactly?
- I am from the security team, I am tracking vulnerabilities and fixing them. And you?
(they started to laugh, and I was trying to figure out why :))
- Hey, what’s wrong? :)
+ We’re from Microsoft’s security team!

I think it was a really nice conjunction, think about that: you find somebody to talk -> you’re colleagues -> and you’re working in the same specific area + they are from a very different point of view.. So we talked about security, open source, Microsoft & Novell and so on. And Android! Damn, despite unlocking it successfuly, I still can’t sign in my Google account.. They were really nice people and shared their knowledge about unlocking phones :) So I realized I have some extra things to do rather than just network unlocking.

And at last.. the funniest part of our conversation:

+ So why are you working for open source anyway?
- For freedom! :)

PS: I spent my Halloween in California’s Great America and had a lot of fun. :) Picturezz ->

Of course there are much more people to mention here. I’d like to see all of them in the next summit!

PS#1: There are some photos (the giant anroid, too!) on my Flickr set: Mentor summit, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Stanford, Palo Alto.

PS#2: To Turkish readers: I merged my Turkish blog (and RSS’ also) with this blog address, so from now on all my entries will be in English. Thanks! :)