Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

SchemaSpy – Graphical Database Schema Metadata Browser

SchemaSpy – Graphical Database Schema Metadata Browser.  This is a tool written in Java that helps one to generate database schema documentation.  Have a look at some sample pages.  Those familiar with Graphviz will immediately realize that the tools is using dot for graphing tables and their relationships.  Those familiar with SugarCRM documentation will immediately notice that SchemaSpy is used for the API documentation.

WhatsApp passes 800,000,000 active users

whatsapp-numbers

TechCrunch is reporting on WhatsApp passing the 800,000,000 active users mark.  Almost exactly a year ago, it was at 500 million active users.  I don’t care much about WhatsApp’s business or service, but from the technical point of view this is quite significant.  That’s almost a million active users acquired every day for the last year.  That’d be a challenge for anyone to handle.  Thinking that this growth might have been not too linear gives me digital goose bumps.

I haven’t seen anything recent describing their infrastructure, but this article from last year provides a starting point for the imagination:  Erland + FreeBSD + 550 servers, with preference for larger box with loads of RAM and cores.  I’m sure that have grown quite a bit in a year too.

Mail::RFC822::Address: regexp-based address validation

This is pure gold!  Check out the regular expression for an RFC822 email address validation. I’m not going to paste it here, being concerned that it will open the gates of hell or something, but here is a sneak preview of about the first third or so.

regex