Paul Lindner

hi5 (RIP) was originally a dating site and Pivoted to a Social Network.

Most profiles fake? I can say for sure that's not true. I maintained Postgres/Memcache/Graph DBs and the write load was real.

That said hi5 did engage in address book scraping and other dark patterns that you'd rather not see these days.

Fun fact: hi5 had a featured photos/profiles section based on popularity. Folks that ended up there deleted their account by 5x or more due to the unwanted attention their 'popular' photos garnered....

Bighomepic

We had a great turnout at the latest PostgreSQL users group meetup -- around 35 people showed. (Oh and not the group of stylish "Hi5 folk" you see to the right :)

Ram and I went over the PostgreSQL based DB architecture we use at Hi5 after the obligatory pizza feed.  Quite an interesting crowd, some newbies, and some old hands.

My best line of the night was in response to a question asking us when we were going to use a specific feature -- my answer was that there were more people in the room than there were employees at Hi5.  :)

The complete presentation is online for the curious.

#hi5 #postgres #postgresql

#vox

I can't believe it myself, Paul leaving Six Apart? Yes, it's true -- I've accepted an offer to be Hi5's Architect.

You can't fathom how much I will miss Six Apart -- the smart people, the positive dynamic environment, the technology and vision. I'm proud of what we've accomplished together and hope that my contributions have a lasting legacy beyond my final day, October 20th.

It sure has been a wild ride. Hard to believe it, but when I arrived TypePad was in the terrible twos - 2 app servers, 2 web servers, 2 Postgres 7.3beta databases, and (oh my) 2 SnapServers. Linux Kernel 2.6.5 had just been released and we were pushing a little over 10Mbps of traffic. Since then we've scaled up beyond belief while overcoming all sorts of obstacles. We've seen many new Typepad Stacks, two colo moves, three new ISPs, three new versions of Postgres, and dozens of software pushes all while building up great Engineering and Ops organizations to care and tend it all.

My immediate plans are to wrap up all of the loose ends while pushing forward on one last hurrah -- finishing up a simple version of Typepad and Mogile integration. If there's unfinished business or you want a brain dump of anything please let me know so we can take care of this in the next week and a half.

Don't forget to join me for a very special FooBar on October 20th to reminisce about all the great success we've shared over the past two and a half years.

After that... well, let's try to keep in touch.

I'll do my best to blog more on my Vox Blog, my LiveJournal, and my new experimental Typepad Blog. You can email me at lindner@inuus.com.

You can also find me at the following places

• Hi5 Profile
• LinkedIn Profile
• LastFM Profile
• Friendster Profile (rarely used)

Thanks again for everything!

Paul