Hackathon lessons

I have been on a hackathon last night, I haven't done this for over a decade. There were a few things I learned:

1. I am a bad UI engineer, but not terribly bad. Just simply bad. I can live with this :) But also I think I could quickly improve my skills in this direction if I had some time. - meaning at the expense of my other projects
2. Family duty is difficult to fit together with all-day all-nigh work. Ok, I kind of knew this, but now I know a lot better.

Things that now I remember a lot better (meaning I knew it):

1. Go prepared. What can be ready ready before the start, must be ready for the start.
2. Preparation is a team-work. All the team must be prepared. Everyone must have the tools installed on their laptops, they must be tested and working fine, all permissions need to be acquired (like github team membership)
   Also it is better to come to agreement on what tools should be used or preferred.
3. A hackathon is not about building an application. For that it would be amazingly bad. It is about building an idea, the purpose of everything that you do on the hackathon is to demonstrate that idea.
4. Perfection is a total enemy in this respect. Whatever works, is fine. Maybe even if it looks crappy. It will be scraped anyway.
   If we are able to demonstrate the idea, someone will have enough time to do this right.
   If we don't not only the code will go to the garbage can, but a potentially valuable idea too.
5. Be OK with what you have achieved. If you are not, you are discrediting the idea, turning the whole team-effort into a waste.

Wikipedia loads

A bit off-topic for today. I wrote an app to follow Wikipedia loads in Kotlin and MongoDB, it was quite an interesting experience and I learned a lot from the experiment, it would be enough for some post, but what I really wanted to show you is interesting from other perspective: it is a visualization of some facts about internet users, languages and cultures.

On each chart, the black line represents traffic in request/hour and the red line is rendered from the averages of the traffic in that hour in several days.

English: around the clock

Usage graph of the english wikipedia

The English Wikipedia is a wiki built from over 6-million articles maintained by a very big and very active community. What is interesting for me in the English language is that the sun never sets on it. English is the official language of the United States with more than 300 million, Canada with 20 million, Australia with 21 million and United Kingdom with 60 million native english speakers. Also official language in India and smaller Asian countries and several African countries.
This gives that intereresting shape to the curve with several smaller peaks.

• the big peak is at 18:00 UTC with roughly 14 million request/hour
• the second peak is at 2:00 UTC with 12 million request/hour. t
• the load never seems to go lower than 8 million request/hour (even that is huge) at around 7:00 UTC
• the top load that I have seen is about 18 million request/hour

German: day use

 

German Wikipedia usage

Let's see my favorite industrial nation. Unlike English, German language is almost only spoken in Europe. This may be the reason why we see bigger ups and downs in the curve, the top of the average load is 2.1 million request/hour, but it is also changing day by day, the top activity you see is 4 million request/hour. That is a huge activity from the 120 million native German-speakers.

Hebrew: Sunday wiki

Hebrew Wikipedia usage

I chose hebrew from the small languages. While it is spoken by very small minorities in so many countries, it is only official and majority language in Israel. These folks have a very strange habbit: Friday is not a working day, but they work on Sunday. Saturday is the most sacred thing for religious Jewish people and they do not work.
Actually the low traffic that you see on the chart is not a Saturday. Saturdays are totally average days on the Hebrew Wikipedia and the top day is Sunday. Sunday is always over average.

Hungarian: The Two Towers

Hungarian Wikipedia usage

The other small language that I chose is Hungarian, my native language. (Did you notice my grammar mistakes?) The interesting thing in this curve is the two peaks of lunchtime and dinner (19:00 GMT, which is 6 PM in Hungary). I can't explain. Most people spend a little time checking mail, googling some stuff and reading Wikipedia at dinner? Anyway, usage after dinner falls dramatically.

Russian: Siberia

 

Russian Wikipedia usage graph

The last example is from Russian, I wanted to see a language which is spoken in 10 different timezones all across Europe and Asia. It does not show, very likely because of the population distribution of Russia, most Russians live in the European parts of Russia, while Siberia is almost uninhabited. Nice rivers, forests, mountains.

That's it for today, thanks for reading! I took the very last picture over the beautiful Siberia, I hope one day I will have a chance to see it from close. I mean without having to build a railway :-)

...and...

...and I am back.

I moved to Brno, Czech Republic and now I am working for Red Hat.

Since I am not good in czech and most people in Brno are not good in english, it took a few weeks, but now I have internet connection at home and I will continue my performance check soon. Recently I have been playing with Cassandra and Infinispan. Cool stuff :-)

Starting up...

Hi,

I am Laszlo, .* developer at Duct-tape Solutions Inc. I am working for about 11 years in the information technology industry and I use java probably for 10 years on a daily basis. This is my new blog about java tools focusing on performance. Topics that I would like to cover:

• Performance considerations of java core classes
• Comparison of standard implementations, e.g. Tomcat versus Jetty, ActiveMQ versus HornetQ
• Architecture - architecture is where most projects go wrong
• Scaling out: Clustering and computation models - e.g. hadoop versus terracotta
• Scaling up: Concurrency, memory, garbage collector and other JVM parameter tuning

Guidelines for posts:

• I will share the test code for each post. I will have a mercurial repository at google code. 
• I will use maven as build tool whenever possible, just to keep things simple.
• Graphs
• Description of the hardware and software environment. OS, java version, java runtime parameters, hardware components and so on...

Anyway, this is my first blog in english, sorry about the grammar mistakes. I hope you will enjoy!