Planet Nectarius

I’ve been working on the next version of the scrobbling api at last.fm for ages now.
At one point we decided to abandon the tomcat container and rewrite it as a thrift server. That was actually rather easy and in the refactoring process we made things quite a bit better.

The last few months has mostly been integrating it with the existing web services and working around our web stack deployment schedule. That is, hooking up the thrift server to our php webservices framework. The amount of code in there is tiny, but it’s taken time because we have done very extensive testing and sometimes had to wait till the next release cycle to see the changes (we optimised the process by the end). So many wonderfully tedious unit tests and time consuming load tests (with graphs!). I even wrote some php unit tests myself. The load testing also managed to uncover an unknown obscure issue that’s been effecting the whole site subtly.

Anyway, I’m pretty pleased with the result. We’ve released next beta 2 now. See my forum post.
I’m fairly confident this will be the finalised api and we’ll announce it as such soon.

Wow it’s been a long time with no blogging.. Just thought I’d post some abbreviated updates.

The lease on my current place runs out on the 31st, so I’m looking for rooms again.

I saw Fever Ray at Shepard’s Bush Empire on Thursday. It was amazing.

At Last.fm we’ve been working hard on the next iteration of search (with neat auto-completion) and launched a beta to subscribers on Wednesday.

I’ve been playing with HBase, and loaded a 700 million cell table into a 5 node cluster with no problems at all. I’m also setting up this mini cluster so I can run Dumbo jobs over HBase.

Also of note: Last.fm is hiring.

I made a blog post for the last.fm blog.

Audiosurf is an amazing game for music lovers.. There’s an upcoming patch in beta, which adds Last.fm scrobbling support, which I dreamed of from the start.

This will make Audiosurf an MMOG. It enables a persistent record of the players path in the game. It does lack the scores next to the play counts however. For me though each play through a song is an achievement in it’s own right. To track that journey is something I crave. Perhaps that’s what makes things like last.fm and twitter so popular anyway, in a way they are social games, to be able to share and display progress is a requirement.

There really is a convergence between social networking sites and gaming like mechanics. This new patch is really a leveraging of emerging experiences that enhances the user experience of both, all through the power of web 2.0. How’s that for some buzzwords?

Lets say last.fm is a game and our profile is our character. I find it interesting that initially when playing audiosurf it I felt like I wasn’t able to ‘improve’ my last.fm character. This is the same experience I have when I use my mp3 player (which doesn’t track my song play count), which frustratingly is most of my music time these days.