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This Team Used Apache Cassandra… You Won’t Believe What Happened Next
You know that old saying, “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is?” We technologists should probably apply that saying to database vendor claims pretty regularly. In the summer of 2014, the Parse.ly team finally kicked the tires on Apache Cassandra. I say “finally”, because after years of using other distributed database…
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Grokking Python Event Loops and Concurrency with Apache Cassandra
Python offers a number of different concurrency models, including multi-threading, process pools, and cooperative multitasking around an async event loop. These various concurrency models were demonstrated in a fun live coding session by David Beazley at PyCon US 2015, entitled “Concurrency From the Ground Up”. This post will explore why the Python driver for Apache…
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Engaged Journalism: Lessons From Professor Jake Batsell
Jake Batsell’s research as a professor has always leaned toward the nuts and bolts of journalism; while other professors taught me the history and concepts of the field, Batsell took me and my fellow students to the courthouse to learn how to request information from municipalities. He’s applied this practical approach to the modern, digital-first…
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The data behind the average article lifespan
The fast pace of online content means that often an article or post barely makes its way through the CMS before it feels like you’re onto the next one, both as writers and readers. So we decided to find out: how long does an article “last” online? To answer, we look to the Parse.ly network…
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Pay-What-You-Will, and Other Paywall Solutions for Online Media
Giving away the work of news and publishing companies online has been called “the original sin” of the internet. Since that metaphorical fall of Eve, digital media providers have been exploring how to move from open access to paywall structures, but not many have broke the code. That’s where one of Parse.ly’s partners, Tinypass, thinks…
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Kafkapocalypse: a postmortem on our service outage
On Thur, Mar 26 2015 and Fri, Mar 27 2015, Parse.ly experienced several outages of its data processing backend. The result was several hours of no new data appearing in our analytics dashboards, both for existing customers of our production analytics product at dash.parsely.com, and for select beta customers of our new product, at preview.parsely.com.…
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Where Can You Learn More About Data Journalism?
Data literacy has quickly become one of the most important skills for journalists to acquire due to the vast accumulations of data now collected by everyone from the government to Candy Crush. Many career journos did not enter the field with the analytical skills necessary to break down the fundamentals of a balance sheet or…
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Lucene: The Good Parts
Before MongoDB, before Cassandra, before “NoSQL”, there was Lucene. Did you know that Doug Cutting wrote the first versions of Lucene in 1999? To put things in context, this was around the time Google was more a research project than an actual trusted application. Google’s proof-of-concept search engine was still a sprawling set of desktop…
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Why I’m Excited About The New Republic Fund Investing in Parse.ly
As the CEO of a software technology start-up, there are a few big names out there that you look up to as people who have “made it.” The founders and co-founders of the companies that once started out, as you did, but today are household names: Facebook, Google, Apple. When you’re starting out, you imagine…