During my long vacation from work, I thought about the current state of MySpace and whether or not I wanted continue my tenure there.
I had been hacking full time on an open source project there for the last year (a project I've been a part of for years now, in some sort or another). After succeeding in making this open source project a viable opportunity for the company, we ended up not moving forward with it. It's too bad, I was doing some of the best work of my career. I'm sorry if this sounds vague, but if I get the go ahead, I'll share more later.
So, instead of going back to work today, I decided to quit. I'm so happy I made this decision that I have the biggest grin on my face right now. I don't know where I'm going next, but I'd really like to enjoy the summer here in Los Angeles without any responsibilities. Besides, living at the beach means every day is a vacation.
Fortunately, I had plenty of time to experiment with multi-core optimization and decent freedom to use the languages of my choice. Hopefully the python, C and C# I left behind will be maintainable by others 
One of the projects I've started in the mean time is cache system. Expect its initial release to have:
- Transparent cache, cache misses will fetch the data from your storage tier
- Python, Javascript, Ruby, C, Vala, and C# support (on both the cache servers and load balancer)
- Cache object versioning and intelligent merging
- Related cache data locality, related data gets cached together (I'll write in the future why this is so important for smooth scaling)
- Manhole like twisted for administrating a live cache
- Dynamo style data mirroring
So to my fellowed MySpacer's: For those about to rock, I salute you!
Comments (12)
I have a lot of respect for you my friend and I’m so glad that we had the oppertunity to work together on what may have been the most awesomest OS shit in forever. No matter how unaffective you may feel this work was for us, please find comfort in the seeds that you sowed whilst hacking those late nights outside the NOC.
Dude, it was righteous! I don’t think we would have successfully finished the project without you Robbie!
We’ll be in touch I’m sure
Sorry to see you go. I don’t think I’m ready to bail on MySpace yet. I still have a ton of hope for both MySpace and my teams product MySpaceID. I’ve been wrong before though. Keep us posted on what you’re up too.
Brandon, yeah I hope so too! I’m thrilled about the excitement around open-standards. They are easy to talk, hard to implement!
Hate to see ya go but understand why you left. Hope you land a nice job somewhere!
It was a pleasure working with you Christian!
Enjoy your break, and good luck with your future adventures.
I hope to see you around the open source communities that you have been contributing to.
Best wishes!
Miguel
@miguel the pleasure was all mine.
I’m sure you know you were the reason i started hacking in the first place years ago!
Hello,
This post got me curious: How come you have to be vague about an Open Source project. Non-disclosure seems a bit counter to the idea of Open Source doesn’t it?
Anyway, congratulations with the holiday.
Hi Tor,
As for the project I was working on, I thought it was pretty obvious I was hacking on Mono. And for the new one I’m starting, I just don’t want to get too much hype before I have something deliverable
I’m wondering what this totally awesome thing is you developed while working at MySpace, but which is now not to be released.
Will we ever find out?
@mike: https://cia.vc/stats/author/chergert/
This might give you a good idea.
Unfortunately most of my work was committed by other people while at myspace