Rethinking online advertising by respecting the user: The load time chapter
This is the first installment in a series of posts detailing the steps we are taking to make Imprint a pleasant and non-intrusive online advertising experience
Code
Watch your JSON
I spent some time this weekend improving the performance of the server-side request processing logic for Imprint. This particular code path executes on every request for an Imprint impression, which on a casual day is around 10k requests / sec. The logic is fairly straight forward but several steps are required before we can send a single byte back to the client. A non-exhaustive list of computations required:…
A simple caching strategy
We frequently read stories about growing % in six months and somewhere along the way they hit a scalability wall. Requests dropped, users suffered. Many prayers and goat sacrifices later, the problem…
The Network is Reliable
Those who design systems with the assumption that the network is reliable, have never experienced the joy of an IRC netsplit as kids
The secret to great looking Native Ads Colors Colours Kolors
A number of people have recently complimented us on how the Sidelines’ native ad unit looks great no matter where it is displayed and no matter what the content is. Having a seamless look and feel is…
Updating Table Schema in Google BigQuery
In every analytics system design, no matter how much you plan what events you gather and what properties to store for each event, there are bound to be omissions. Or sometimes code improvements present themselves that allow for better semantic normalization of the same raw data. Google BigQuery does not allow us to change field names or types and rightly so; in an analytics backend data is assumed to be immutable. We can however append new fields or make some required fields optional. I’m including some code that goes hand in hand with the infer schema snippet I posted a while back. Note that I’ve removed error checks and retry logic for brevity. Unfortunatley Google APIs 500 fairly often so I strongly recommend you code defensively.…