The only criticism of the deal I could possibly give is that MySQL is still on the early phase of an exponential adoption curve and I think they’ve got lots of growth yet to come. But really, a billion dollars has a lot if not most of that growth factored into the price already. Think of what [...]

Ever sine I wrote Open Source Distributed Computing: Yahoo's Hadoop Support back in July, interest in Hadoop and Yahoo's work has been on the rise. So I started to get to know the Hadoop team at Yahoo a bit better and help them figure out how to tell more of the story.

We decided that it'd make sense to have a new blog on the Yahoo! Developer Network where we can collect & post news, tips, announcements, videos, and anything else related to Hadoop and distributed computing work.

To kick off the blog, which we're calling Hadoop and Distributed Computing at Yahoo!, I sat down with Eric Baldeschwieler ("Eric14") to do …

Back in February I wrote about the release of Yahoo! Pipes (see Yahoo! Pipes: Unlocking the Data Web):

So if you're interested in an interactive on-line data mashup construction set, check it out and have a look at the existing pipes developers have created. I think it's one of the coolest web apps we've released in a long time, and I'm not just saying that because I know the guys who built it. Not only does it make hard things easy (like Perl has done for years), the user interface kicks ass too. It's exciting both from a technological point of view and because of the implications for the web as a whole.

Since February, Pipes has been growing and improving (see the Pipes blog) and the …

While going thru the process of putting the presentation for my China trip (and describing it to a friend part way through the process), it occurred to me that I have a specific method that I seem to follow each time.

Before I describe it, I should point out that there are really two types of presentations I've had to create over the last few years: new and derived.

As I thought about this, it occurred to me that I seem to find myself presenting over and over on subjects in the same specific topic area for roughly 9 to 24 months before I move on to something newer and different. Those phases, unsurprisingly, coincide with my role at work at the time.

Past phases were roughly:

• MySQL, Perl, and Open Source in general
…

[Note: Most of this comes from the standard job description... More from me at the bottom.]

Do you prefer to work on a wide variety of projects in a challenging environment? Have you ever felt that your job was monotonous or repetitive? Are you a builder, not a maintainer? Do you enjoy change? If so, Yahoo's platform engineering may have the job for you. Come be a part of our Tiger team.

The Tiger team at Yahoo is dedicated to providing highly skilled, senior engineers to a variety of projects. Tigers perform as an internal "consulting" team, providing short term resourcing to dedicated product engineering teams that have critical or time sensitive problems. In the past Tigers have contributed to highly visible products such as Y! Mail and anti-spam, Y! Messenger and Y! Alerts.

The ideal Tiger is a technically strong engineer who likes a dynamic environment and assignments that change every 6-8 months. As a member of the …

The MyBlogLog team is looking to grow and we could use a few good engineers. We're currently on the hunt for a good general purpose LAMP engineer: someone who knows their Apache, PHP, Perl, MySQL, and related stuff.

This job is ideal for someone who lives in San Francisco, Berkeley, or Oakland and wants to work on a small team that's continuing to build a service that's growing very quickly and has very passionate users. We have lot of new hardware to play with, a great office, and tons of ideas about where to take the service.

The Yahoo! office is located on University Ave, just a few blocks from campus and the local BART station. There's also an amazing selection of eateries just outside the front door.

Send me your resume if you're interested.

We're also …

For far too long now RSS has been used in ways that don't really tap its true potential. Being able to syndicate my favorite headlines or blog posts is great. In fact, it helped to kick off a revolution in personal on-line publishing that is still growing and evolving. But I want so much more.

It's not for lack of vision. Back in 2005, Adam Bosworth painted a vision that eventually manifested itself as GData. I wrote about that a bit in Google's GData, MySQL, and the Future of on-line Databases.

It's not for lack of data either. You can get RSS output from lots of non-news and non-blog stuff. Everything from classifieds on eBay and …

With a title like "Why Google and Yahoo! can't be better open source citizens" one might think that our companies were squeezing as much as possible out of the open source world and giving little back.

But after reading Matt Assay's post a few times, I've begun to wonder how much open source code he's been publishing.

Putting aside the many contributions that Yahoo and Google have already made to various open source projects (Linux, FreeBSD, Perl, MySQL, PHP, etc.), I'd like to debunk his conclusion:

All of which means, as Tim pointed out, that these companies have failed to write code according to a cardinal open source principle: modularity. Yahoo! and Google can't open source more code because their code is too tightly bound together - layer upon layer upon layer requiring layer upon layer upon layer. This …

It seems like just a few days ago when we announced Movable Type on Yahoo! Web Hosting. Understandably, lots of folks asked for WordPress support. Luckily, Matt and the hosting folks have been busy.

Sign up now and get:

• 33% off the monthly price for the first six months, and the setup fee is waived
• Free domain name
• 200GB data transfer per month
• Support for up to 1 million page views per day**
• 5GB disk space for your posts, graphics, and more
• Support for PHP, Perl, and MySQL
• 24-hour toll-free phone support

Enjoy. It's been in the works for quite a while now. :-)

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