Posts - Page 4 of 10

SmugMug video data loss

Post author By Yoav Aner
Post date 16 December, 2018

I’ve written only recently about SmugMug, and expressed my frustration as a developer who built an open-source tool for their platform. This has led me to try to get my data out of SmugMug as I was considering moving away from it as well… Only to discover that some of my video data is lost and/or not being made available. This applies only for videos. Both the quality is potentially degraded, and the metadata that is available on SmugMug cannot be downloaded or exported out of their platform.

If you upload a video to SmugMug, they don’t actually store the original video for you. Here’s a quote from their official page:

Originals

We don’t keep a copy of the original video you upload. We make high-quality display copies, which are probably altered from what you send us.

I’m not sure what this high-quality display copy means in actual terms, but I won’t be surprised if some quality is lost in the process. For a company that prides itself caring for photographers, where quality and reliability is key, I find it rather vague and disconcerting.

Furthermore, what isn’t mentioned on this page is that if you want to download your videos again, those videos would be stripped-out of the original metadata as well. This metadata includes information about the Camera you used, the date/time of the video, location information etc. All of this data is still stored on SmugMug, but you can’t get it back when you download it. It’s locked-in. For me, personally, this is even worse than losing video quality. My video memories are very tightly linked to the time and location of those original scenes. Without this info, the videos are next to useless. I just can’t find them (without going manually through hundreds or thousands of dateless and location-less videos, that is)

Uncategorized

Introducing envwarden – manage your server secrets with Bitwarden

Post author By Yoav Aner
Post date 15 December, 2018

TL;DR

envwarden is a simple, open-source script that lets you easily manage your server secrets with the Bitwarden password manager.

An open letter to SmugMug

Post author By Yoav Aner
Post date 12 December, 2018

TL;DR

SmugMug is great, but its developer ecosystem is, in my humble opinion, crumbling, and can use some serious love — or put out of its misery and die…

Dear SmugMug, there are lots of people, myself included, who want to see you thrive and succeed. People who are spending their free time, resources and energy on sharing their tools with the community. People who can build great things on top of SmugMug, and can make SmugMug even more successful than it currently is. Please don’t forget us. We are the potential evangelists, multipliers, and we do this for free. Please treat our free gifts with respect. These gifts might be free, but they are precious. They should be cherished, rather than ignored, or discarded.

optimization Performance rails ruby

The dark side of Rails Russian Doll Caching

Post author By Yoav Aner
Post date 1 December, 2018

Rails Russian Doll Caching is super cool. It’s simple, effective and makes caching much easier to reason about.

There’s a dark side to it though. Not in the negative, evil sense. But rather the hidden, unknown, confusing sense.

iphone mobile Technology

The one (stupid) feature

Post author By Yoav Aner
Post date 25 November, 2018

My wife and I started using Amazon photos a while ago. I didn’t think that much of it first, but it was included with our Prime membership, and offered an automatic upload from our phones, plus free storage (for photos), so why not?

Fast forward a couple of years. We’ve since cancelled Prime, and I wanted to switch to Dropbox, which has comparable automatic upload, a mobile app, and superior sync with a proper linux client. But I couldn’t. Why? Because of this one (stupid) feature.

Which one?

Technology

Why I’m not using Fastmail

Post author By Yoav Aner
Post date 11 September, 2016

Prepare for a somewhat ranty post, but it doesn’t come from a bad place. I honestly want Fastmail to succeed. I’m eager to see more alternatives for email hosting, and clients (and there are scaringly few).
I also acknowledge that some of the problems I bumped into are quite specific to my own setup, which isn’t common. So in some ways, it’s not about you, Fastmail. It’s me. Make your own judgement.

TL;DR – Fastmail is pretty neat, but their support sucks. Their support ticket system sucks even more, and their product is not clear enough to work without support. From my personal experience anyway.

monitoring optimization Performance python Technology

a scalable Analytics backend with Google BigQuery, AWS Lambda and Kinesis

Post author By Yoav Aner
Post date 1 April, 2016

On my previous post, I described the architecture of Gimel – an A/B testing backend using AWS Lambda and redis HyperLogLog. One of the commenters suggested looking into Google BigQuery as a potential alternative backend.

It looked quite promising, with the potential of increasing result accuracy even further. HyperLogLog is pretty awesome, but trades space for accuracy. Google BigQuery offers a very affordable analytics data storage with an SQL query interface.

There was one more thing I wanted to look into and could also improve the redis backend – batching writes. The current gimel architecture writes every event directly to redis. Whilst redis itself is fast and offers low latency, the AWS Lambda architecture means we might have lots of active simultaneous connections to redis. As another commenter noted, this can become a bottleneck, particularly on lower-end redis hosting plans. In addition, any other backend that does not offer low-latency writes could benefit from batching. Even before trying out BigQuery, I knew I’d be looking at much higher latency and needed to queue and batch writes.

monitoring optimization Performance python Technology

a Scaleable A/B testing backend in ~100 lines of code (and for free*)

Post author By Yoav Aner
Post date 20 January, 2016

(updated: 2016-05-07)

tip-toeing on the shoulders of giants

Before I dive into the reasons for writing Gimel in the first place, I’d like to cover what it’s based on. Clearly, 100 lines of code won’t get you that far on their own. There are two (or three) essential components this backend is running on, which makes it scalable and also light-weight in terms of actual code:

AWS Lambda (and Amazon API Gateway) – handle the requests to both store experiment data and to return the experiment results.
Redis – using Sets and HyperLogLog data structures to store the experiment data. It provides an extremely efficient memory footprint and great performance.

For free?

optimization Technology

AlephBet – javascript A/B Test framework for developers

Post author By Yoav Aner
Post date 6 June, 2015

I recently created AlephBet: a new javascript A/B Test framework, built for developers. This post tries to capture the motivation and some background for creating it in the first place, especially with so many commercial and open-source frameworks and services available for A/B testing.

Technology

Stop showing me your homepage

Post author By Yoav Aner
Post date 29 January, 2015

I haven’t noticed it much before, but it’s becoming a pet peeve once I started paying attention to it.

We LOVE homepages. Like eyes being the key to our souls, our homepage shows who we really are. What we stand for. They turn random visitors to loyal customers. They inspire trust, build an emotional connection, they bind us together… ok ok. You got the picture. Homepages are great.

But once I’m sold. I’m in. I gave you my email. I’m a loyal customer. I go to your site every. single. day. Do I really need to see your homepage again??! Do I actually care that you changed the photo on the frontpage and highlighted another benefit to potential customers? Or most important – do I really have to click the ‘Login’, ‘Go to my app’, ‘Dashboard’ or whatever other link you give me to get started?