If these notes are incomplete, inaccurate, or misspelled, it’s completely my fault and not Matt’s.

Presentation by Matt Mullenweg

Architecture?

Scaling.

• Types of Scaling:

  1. Platform
  2. Business
  3. Community
  4. People

• over 800,000 splogs deleted

• stats of WP

Scaling Platform

Matt’s Magic Mini-Cluster

• hard to figure out what people really want

• scaling is a good problem to have it, if you ever have it

• 7 boxes about $1500/mo

• 2 load balancers
• any cpu
• 2 gb mem
• any disk

• pound + wackamole + Spread

• 2 databases

• any cpu
• 4GB + memory
• fast disks, RAID

• master + slave MySQL setup

• 3 web servers

• fast cpu
• 2 gb mem
• any disks

• well-configured apache

• Use HyperDB

• a database class they developed to handle multiple DBs; load balance the DB at the software level

A Few Rules to Follow

• Put Everything in Subversion
• Be Stateless
• stay away from DB session
• let every request stand on it’s own
• then it becomes a matter of arithmetic when it comes to scaling
• Memcached
• distributed hash table
• allows you to manage caching well
• caches things in memory
• easily put things in a memcache and pull it out, and expire it
• Just use Wordpress.com
• http://2007.wordcamp.org/schedule/hyperdb-and-performance

Scaling Community

• most importantly, once you get to a certain point, just let go (http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/)
• institutionalized serendipity
• personalize the experience at a certain point
• check out: http://ma.tt/about

Scaling Business

• Upgrades; free is great
• took an a la carte approach to features
• didn’t work entirely
• Ads: personally doesn’t like ads
• shows only to random visitors
• if you use firefox, you’ll never see an ad on wordpress.com (because Matt likes Firefox)
• pissed fewer people off, and click through rates much much higher
• VIP
• helps run other’s blogs
• “fox news” unfortunately (ha ha)

Scaling People

• don’t have to micromanage
• ideally are better at their job then you

Hiring

• Great People = rich environment + worthwhile problems
• try to tackle something that’s slightly out of your league

1. Passion for Space
2. Personality Fit (it’s like getting married)
3. Ability to Learn (Curiosity)
   • no correlation between intelligence and productivity
   • skills you came into a job with are not the skills that you’ll need in the future necessarily
4. Familiarity with Technologies
   • least important
   • don’t hire for specific skill sets
5. Taste
   • if something seems off with them, default answer is “no”
   • if you get any red flags during the hiring process, I would recommend moving on
   • one mediocre person will drain a sea of bright people (they will not “suffer fools”)

• work with a person on a contract basis first

Scaling Brand

In a Name

• related Proctor and Gamble story
• decided to name product to “Ivory” (soap)
• over 100 years

• have over 20 brands that make over a billion dollars a year

• recommends “On Writing Well” by Zissner