The following is a quick Rapleaf update for engineers (read time: [1011101] seconds). (If you have trouble reading this, please visit: http://business.rapleaf.com/engineering_update_2009_02_12.html) UPDATES 1. Engineering is our bread and butter; product and marketing are our mashed potatoes and fries With now 12 engineers on board, 4 engineering interns for the summer (still hiring 1 more summer intern), and the new TMX Cookie Monster, we're looking to add more firepower. We're looking to bring on a product manager, 3 more rock star software engineers, and a direct marketing person...referrals are mucho appreciated. More info below: http://business.rapleaf.com/careers.html 2. A Rapleaf Haiku: Person/Social Media API We got APIs (It's no lie so get in line) For developers! http://www.rapleaf.com/developer 3. Prediction for 2009: The Year of the Social Graph This year will be known as the year of the social graph. Consumers will better leverage their social graph for their benefit. Companies will provide better services and products because of their consumers' social graph. And social networking walled gardens will continue to come down. (All of which places Rapleaf in a prime position) That's our prediction for this year. DEVELOPER BLOG Below are some recent posts by our developers on our Rapleaf Engineering blog: http://blog.rapleaf.com/dev - Graceful shutdown, Hadoop, and black magic Recently, while working on the Collector, I noticed that we had an issue with graceful shutdown of our servers. The Collector uses a JVM shutdown hook to catch the SIGTERM and take some cleanup actions before allowing the exit to go on. However, every time I would try to... - Rapleaf Challenge Problem We've created a challenge problem based on one of the core problems we've had to solve in our MapReduce workflow. A word of warning - this isn't one of those toy problems other companies put out on their careers page. This one is so hard it will make you cry. - Rent or Own: Amazon EC2 vs. Colocation Comparison for Hadoop Clusters For some time now, Rapleaf has been hard at work converting a critical portion of our infrastructure from a MySQL-based system to a Hadoop-based one. We see it as a much more obvious path to linear scalability of our processing pipeline. Since scalability is our goal... Thanks for reading! Best, Vivek Sodera Rapleaf --------------------------------------------------- Vivek Sodera Co-Founder Rapleaf 657 Mission Street, Suite 600 San Francisco, CA 94105 vivek@rapleaf.us