Who are you, and what do you?

Ahoy! I’m Matthew Rothenberg. Most people here call me mroth.

I’m the head of product strategy / management at Flickr, which means I’m ultimately responsible for figuring out what Flickr needs to build and why. I work with all of our teams during the development of Flickr features to help make sure they meet our goals and vision, as well as do boring manager-y things. In reality, that means I spend most of my life in meetings (formal or informal).

In a broader sense, I’m responsible for trying to make Flickr the world’s best place to share your photos with the people who matter to you.

What hardware are you using?

I have a 15” MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM (which I insist on still calling a PowerBook). I have a 24” Dell display both at work and at home, but I almost never bother to plug into them anymore.

Mobile, oy–I have way too many phones. My primary phones that I carry every day are a BlackBerry 9650 (writing email, making phone calls I want to stay connected for more than 60 seconds), and an iPhone 4 (browsing the web and my primary camera). I also have a Palm Pre (used to be my main phone, now I use it mostly for development), HTC Evo 4G (development and testing) and a Nokia N95-3 (which I use as the world’s most expensive alarm clock). With all those phones, I’m a heavy Google Voice user for bouncing calls back and forth.

For running all my side projects and home backup, I have a homebuilt Linux (Ubuntu Server 10.04.1 LTS) server with an Atom chipset sitting in a MSI Wind enclosure, and a Seagate “Green” hard drive that spins down to lower speeds to conserve power.

My loft’s stereo is wired up for network play via AirTunes and Airport Express, but unfortunately the software for it is so terrible (no streaming from iOS) it doesn’t get much use currently — I’m hoping AirPlay in iOS 4.2 will finally resolve this. More successfully I do stream video via the 802.11n network from the Linux server to my Sony PS3 which is hooked up to the television (Sony 40” flatscreen of some sort, if anyone actually cares).

The most transformative tech hardware I’ve purchased in years has been the Kindle (2nd gen), which completely changed my relationship with books. It perfectly embodies the design principle of doing one thing exceptionally well, and has resulted in me reading approximately 350% more books since I purchased it.

Finally, and most importantly, the best productivity-enhancing hardware I own is a La Marzocco GS/3 espresso machine.

And what software?

I live in email — I currently use Mail.app for its live search folders but I’m not entirely satisfied with it. There is a definite market for a real “power user” email app that hasn’t quite been filled yet.

Skitch is another “couldn’t live without it” application for me, since I spend a lot of time reviewing not-quite-ready-for-primetime features, it lets me super quickly capture and annotate notes for the team.

I’ve been a UNIX nerd for a long long time, so I spend a lot of time in Terminal.app, and sadly even do most of my basic navigation file system operations in there. For actually hacking on code, I use TextMate.

Most of my side projects are coded in Python, but lately I’ve been dabbling in Ruby/Rails.

Github completely changed the way I hack on side projects. If you haven’t read Anil Dash’s recent blog post on it, you should. If you ever develop software for fun and you aren’t using it, you’re sorely missing out.

I occasionally have to build presentations for my job, so when I do, I insist on using Keynote.

What would be your dream setup?

A mythical iPhone with a physical QWERTY keyboard (jailbroken, of course).

Who are you, and what do you?

Hello, I’m Chris Martin, one of the resident nerds here at Flickr who keep everything running smoothly. I’m from Atlanta, Georgia but I don’t have a southern accent and this seems to disappoint people pretty regularly, I apologize for that.

My focus at Flickr is on mobile engineering and making sure people can get their lovely photos out of their pockets and on to Flickr; and vice versa. In real life I’m a professional travel writer/photographer. I’ve never written anything and my photos are sub-par, but I have to justify traveling around the world somehow.

What hardware are you using?

At work I use a 15″ MacBook Pro hooked up to two 24″ Dell displays, one for code and one for browser windows etc., they are both quite useful for creating a barrier to hide behind during the regular FlickrHQ foam dart wars. I also have a variety of mobile devices that we use to test our own code, 3rd party integrations, and API apps. My Flickr Moleskine and stack of post-it notes are also integral parts of my work hardware setup.

At home I have a pretty assorted collection of hardware, the most interesting of which is probably a 450MHz G4 Cube that sits quietly on my desk and still does a great job as a file server. Rounding out my fanboy worthy collection of Apple products are a unibody 15″ MacBook Pro, an iPad, and an iPhone 4 that replaced my 1st gen iPhone which I’ve used for the past 3 years (and still do for testing). I have two “hackintosh” machines; one desktop with a couple terabyte drives hooked up to my Samsung TV as a media center, and a 12″ ASUS 1201n which I find myself using more than my MacBook Pro because I like it’s small size when I’m out, and I hook up to a 24″ display when I’m at my desk at home.

In my “retired” collection are a linux PC that used to be a MythTV media center, an original eepc 701 that served me well on a 5 month backpacking trip, an ancient original iMac, and an assorted collection of iPods. I have a problem saying goodbye.

It’s probably appropriate to include camera gear as well… I have a Canon 350D which usually wears a 50mm f1.4 lens; it’s starting to show it’s age but has seen and faithfully captured many great trips over the years, a Kodak M1033 which isn’t the greatest camera in the world but it’s built like a tank and was the least obscenely expensive thing I could find in India after leaving a Canon on a train, and a Panasonic Lumix ZS3 that takes excellent video. However, I still take most of my photos with my iPhone.

And what software?

Obviously I’m an OSX guy, ever since I moved from Gentoo linux to a powerbook in college. I love the polish of the Mac GUI, and the raw power of Unix that’s just below the pretty surface.

I use the assortment of standard apps (Safari, Mail.app, iCal, and address book) as my primary browser, mail, and calendar applications. I’ve moved around a bunch in the past in this area, but the apple tools have finally started playing nicely with the google suite of services and they work well enough to keep me happy and in sync with my iPhone.

For development I primarily use TextMate (web-dev) and xCode (Cocoa), with the occasional trip over to Coda when I need to quickly touch something I’m doing any front end development on. I don’t have any special tools I use for source control or file transfer, that’s all svn, git, scp, etc. in terminal.

A few other apps like Linkinus, Adium, and Echofon live in my dock all the time, and of course I pull out photoshop when I need to mock something up.

As for utilities, I absolutely can’t live without Visor, a SIMBL plugin that makes my terminal appear on command from the top of the screen, teleport is a nifty tool for sharing one keyboard and mouse between multiple computers, DeskLickr keeps my desktop beautiful with photos from Flickr, and MenuMeters gives me a quick view of how the computer is doing from the menu bar.

On my phone, I use Echofon for twitter, Reeder is my absolute favorite RSS reader of all time (I wish there were a desktop version), Instapaper, AutoStitch to make panorama photos, iTimelapse for time-lapse video, and of course m.flickr.com and the Flickr app for browsing Flickr.

What would be your dream setup?

As much as I love laptop computers and the amazing mobile devices we have today, I can’t wait until our computing experiences are more thoroughly integrated into all of the other objects we use in daily life. I don’t just mean “connected things”, but more along the lines of augmented reality. I guess my dream setup would be a pair of contact lenses that I could put in in the morning and immediately start seeing extra information in every day life. I’m sure it will be done, but it will be a fine balance between adding to reality, and completely removing ourselves from it; I hope we do it well.

When creating a tool for the help team, one of the main things we wanted to do was find a good way to give them updates on new features and site issues. For any of you that have ever been on a help team you know that no matter how much your boss tells you it’s very important that you check your email or look at X web page for updates before each case, that’s probably not going to happen. When you are trying to get through help cases every click and keystroke counts.

So if you are supposed to check some page that only changes 1 out of 100 times you check it, it naturally falls into the list of things that you probably don’t 100% have to check. You don’t have time for that, you’ve got people to help and the queue keeps growing!

So how do you get people to look at those updates? Make it useful!

To make the page useful we tried to solve one of the other frustrations common to most help teams, the tools you need are all on different pages (maybe even managed by different teams). Go here to search for accounts, over there to search for a photo, another place to look up an ID, etc. Any search that might be needed to research a question we put all on one page. The actual tools may still reside somewhere else, but a search box is also included here so you can get to any tool you need, even the flickr.com searches for pictures and people.

Here is an example of what it looks like with a few parts and dates changed for security reasons.

Directly below the searches is “Current Issues” and new FAQs. Now that this is the page you will start at for every case, you’ll always see these updates.

But is that enough? At each stage we tried to think of our audience. If you are trying to get through cases, when you go to a page over and over you start to tune out what you don’t use. To combat that tunnel vision we rotate the color of the issue title and FAQs so it’s easier to notice that something changed. (I actually usually think of that T-Rex in Jurassic park that only sees you if you move. But don’t tell the help team that’s what I was thinking. They’re actually very nice.)

When we released it to the help team, everyone made it their homepage without the boss man having to go around and make them. Success!

As compliments to writers go, having your work translated into another language comes pretty high on the list. That said, I’m not sure I ever expected to see one of my code.flickr blog posts re-interpreted in Belorussian until this weekend when I was contacted by a translator by the name of Patricia Clausnitzer.

Patricia has provided a Belorussian rendering of my post (complete with pictures of paint tins and me in a stretcher) on a site called pc.de. So if you read Belorussian, you can now get the skinny on our “People in Photos” API methods in your native tongue.

And if you don’t speak Belorussian but want to code up an app that takes advantage of our people-annotating features, you can revisit the original post about the API methods here.

Who are you, and what do you?

I am Timoni Grone, former-Nebraska-farmgirl-now-Californian-city-dweller, and I design web interfaces. I’m currently a UI/visual designer at Flickr, which is a totally rad gig.

What hardware are you using?

At work, I have a 2.15Ghz Core 2 Duo 15″ MBP, a 24″ external monitor, the short Mac keyboard and a Mighty Mouse. At home, I have a 2.67GHz 15″ MBP and a Magic Mouse. I forget how much RAM I have, but both computers are fast enough.

I also have an old Mac Mini working as a media center (hooked up to my absurdly ginormous television), a 2TB Lacie Quadra for backups, an Airport for network stuff, a 16GB wifi iPad and an iPhone 4.

I briefly had a Wacom Cintiq 12WX earlier this year. I excitedly used it for a few weeks, then left it untouched for months, and finally sold it. It was too much of a pain to switch back and forth between the tablet and my laptop.

And what software?

For web dev, I like TextMate, though I was on a strict Coda diet for a while when it made sense to have seamless FTP integration. If I’m using TextMate, I use Transmit. Current browser of choice is Chrome, cause it’s super-fast, though I prefer Firebug to Web Inspector for development.

Day to day, I use Photoshop and Illustrator all the time. I’ve been trying to switch to comping in Fireworks for a while, but for some reason it was never installed on my work computer, so I default back to Photoshop. The way it handles smart objects is a pain, but Save For Web in Illustrator can be effing tricky sometimes (also, the way Illustrator renders text below a certain size makes my eyes hurt).

I have Skitch, the Last.fm scrobble app, and Dropbox running at all times on both of my MBPs. I use Dropbox to sync my work folder and one of my iTunes libraries. Works like a charm and it’s only ten bucks a month.

For print work, I use InDesign. For small things like bills & letterhead, I use TextEdit. I try to avoid halfway-done word processors like Pages and Word; the way they handle style sheets drives me batty.

I just started using Notational Velocity for my to-do lists (thanks Daniel!). I use Google Calendar for scheduling, and have SMS reminders sent to my phone (a total lifesaver). When I want to write, I use Ommwriter, the nicest little text editor out there.

On my iPad, I most often use NetNewsWire, Instapaper, the Kindle app, and Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro.

What would be your dream setup?

We’re at a really fascinating point in hardware development right now, which makes it difficult to answer this question. My knee-jerk answer is that I want the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer combined with an iPad combined with the Cintiq combined with, you know, a Cray supercomputer or something else equally powerful.

The problem is, really, handwriting recognition; if you’ve ever tried to use the iPad with an external keyboard, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Switching from typing to writing or drawing and back is a fucking pain. Regular notebooks allow you to draw and write without changing your hand position, which doesn’t seem like a luxury until you try actually working on a tablet and then find you need to input text.

SJ may think that styli are inelegant, but the fact is, using a pen to write or draw on paper is both comfortable and easy; it’s just not as fast as typing. Most people are content with inputting data via a keyboard, and this makes sense for a lot of jobs: marketing, business development, finance, and programming, for example. But for the designers, there’s a big gap between starting the creative process and executing the product design *because* it’s much easier to sketch out your ideas on paper, with a pen, than a computer. And this is unfortunate; in the future, we should have computers that allow us to keep contexts for different stages of product development. The iPad and ThinkPads are steps in the right direction, but they’re still awfully clumsy, which is why, in part, people criticize the iPad as a product for mere consumption.

I want a Moleskine that is a blindingly superfast computer. That’s my dream setup.

This is the first in a new series of interviews with the Flickr staff, asking what tools (hardware, software) they use to get the job done. Our first volunteer is Nolan Caudill, PHP engineer and wearer of beards.

Who are you, and what do you?

I’m Nolan Caudill, a software engineer at Flickr (obviously). I’m a recent addition to the company and a new transplant to San Francisco. At Flickr, I work on i18n/l10n, though I like to keep a variety of projects on my plate to keep things interesting.

I’m originally from Wilkes County, North Carolina which is the moonshine capital of the world and the birthplace of NASCAR (and those two facts are indeed related). I moved here from the Research Triangle in North Carolina, going to school in Chapel Hill and residing in Durham. My wife and our cat moved here in May and are both loving this chilly, foggy city with good beer and food on every corner.

What hardware are you using?

I’m currently typing this on my work-issued MacBook Pro hooked up to a 24″ HP monitor, fairly par for the course at Flickr. This is the first Mac I’ve worked on in several years and I’m a big fan. The consistency of all the software is nice to use and things just seem to work.

At home, I use a Lenovo Thinkpad R61i with Ubuntu 10.04 installed. I’ve ran Ubuntu since version 4.10 and really enjoy being able to install about any developer tool under the sun with a one-line command. It’s hard to beat the big Debian/Ubuntu repositories. This is also about my third or fourth Thinkpad laptop. They are built like tanks and are nicely supported out of the box by most Linux distributions.

I use a iPhone 3G and it gets along just fine.

And what software?

As far as software goes, my programming life revolves around programming languages, browsers, and text editors.

At work, I do almost everything in PHP and at home I’m always playing with new languages. I’m currently in the process of learning Haskell and learning how compilers work so I can one day build my own toy language. I’ve also done professional work in Python and that is still my favorite multi-purpose language where I can just get stuff done.

My main browser at work is whatever the stable version of Firefox is. Like most web developers, I use Firefox for extensions like Firebug, Web Developer, and Y!Slow. I use Chrome at home, mainly just because I don’t need a lot of bells and whistles when I’m browsing and with a smaller laptop screen, the minimal chrome really frees up some real estate.

At work, I use TextMate to write code. This was a big departure from what I normally used. I’ve always used vim and have those keyboard bindings hard-wired into my muscle memory. I don’t think TextMate is as powerful or as quick to use as vim (at least for me), but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. TextMate shines at its intended purpose, which is to just get some code out. The project navigation and function browse is really nice and having it integrated in the Mac style is a plus. I still use vim for my off-hours hacking projects though.

Other random pieces of software include: iTunes, Adium for both IM and IRC, Thunderbird for email, and Tweetie for keeping up with Twitter.

What would be your dream setup?

As far as dream setup goes, I’ve never been that picky and happy with a minimal setup. As long as I have a PC that keeps up with my work, a good keyboard, a mouse that glides, a good-sized second monitor, and a comfortable chair, I’m golden.

We’ve seen great uptake by library developers on supporting the new Stats APIs. Now we’d love to see what you’re building with those APIs.

PHPFlickr, Flickr.Net, flickrapi.py, CFlickr, and flickcurl all have let us know they support the new APIs.

Poking around the App Garden I found flickrstats which provides a very interactive, and lovely timeline based visualization. (in the style of Google Finance). Are there other great examples? Let us know by adding them to the App Garden or telling us about them in the API Group.

June 1st.

And a reminder.

Historical stats data is only available until June 1st. After June 1st only the last 28 days of data will be available. If you want to archive that data we have the stats download page, and a new utility method flickr.stats.getCSVFiles (because I was too lazy to manually download those files, see programmer virtues).

statsdumper provides a couple of different methods to facilitate backing up all your stats data, but I’d love to hear about others.

Ever since Peter Z from Percona showed us the awesome that is the mk-query-digest tool, we’ve been using it quite a bit to help identify costly queries. It analyzes the MySQL slow query log and compiles a detailed report which includes tons of useful data – how many times was a particular query called? how much time did MySQL spend executing a particular query during the given timeframe? how long did the query take to execute on average? what about the worst case?

The report is output as a long long text file that you can page through and look at all the queries. All the data you need is there, but it’s a bit difficult to get to, especially if you want to compare multiple reports or if you want to aggregate over a period of time longer than the interval at which you run the reports (we’ve been running it every 15 minutes on one of our shards and are in the process of adding it to all servers).

Enter ishmael

Photo from raphie.

Luckily, the tool can be configured to write most of the data in the report to a database table. Where there’s a database, there’s a former tools developer eager to write a UI on top of it (me). After Timmy, our DBA, showed me a quick prototype of a page he put together for displaying the data, I took it and ran with it. The result is ishmael – a UI on top of mk-query-digest. The name comes from the tools purpose – to help hunt down “whale” queries.

For now, ishmael lets you sort the queries by 3 characteristics – the total amount of time MySQL spent executing the query, the number of times the query was actually executed, and the ratio between the two. It also displays the queries with some highlighting (done using a brutal regex) and lets you click through to see historical data (assuming you’ve run the report more than once) as well as a page that shows the EXPLAIN output for the query and the SHOW CREATE TABLE output for the tables involved (once again, traced back from their aliases using brutal regex hacks).

There are already a bunch of additional features in the pipeline – being able to configure ishmael to switch between different databases, better handling of historical data, etc. We hope other mk-query-digest users find the tool useful and can let us know how the tool can be made better. Patches are welcome.

The docs for mk-query-digest are on the maatkit toolkit website: http://www.maatkit.org/doc/mk-query-digest.html.

The source for ishmael, is on github: http://github.com/mihasya/ishmael
(click “Issues” to view the list of open tickets)

photo by xgray

After collections, the most frequently requested addition to the Flickr API has been Stats. Today, alongside access to some archived older data, we’re announcing lots of new API methods that give you access to all the stats data we’re logging.

First up is flickr.stats.getTotalViews. If we call this with no arguments, it will give you the all time view counts for a user’s photos, photostream, sets and collections:

# ?method=flickr.stats.getTotalViews

<stats>
	<total views="584957"/>
	<photos views="391325"/>
	<photostream views="175691"/>
	<sets views="17856"/>
	<collections views="85"/>
</stats>

Sounds simple right? There’s a couple of details that are worth highlighting:

• Not all Flickr members have stats enabled. If you get back an error, then someone needs to visit www.flickr.com/photos/me/stats/ and press the big pink button.
• “All time” is a surprisingly vague concept. We started recording “All-time” view counts for photos, photostreams and sets sometime back in 2006, and started recording collection counts on October 21, 2008.

Now we know how many views someone got on their account, you’ll probably want to drill down into when the views happened, where those views came from, and what photos were popular.

When

Getting details on when the views happened is simple, we can pass a date to flickr.stats.getTotalViews, and get the counts for just that that day. The date can be a unix timestamp, or something like "2010-03-24", but it has to be in the last 28 days as we don’t keep detailed data around longer than that.

What

Getting an idea of exactly what photos have been viewed is also simple – you can call flickr.stats.getPopularPhotos. This returns a standard photos response, with an extra <stats> element giving the view, comment and favorite counts. As with flickr.stats.getTotalViews, this can be called with a date if you’d like to narrow down your results to just one day.

Where

Lastly, if you want to know where the views came from, you can call flickr.stats.getPhotoDomains. This gives a list of all of the domains that sent traffic to the photo. If you want even more detail on a domain, flickr.stats.getPhotoReferrers will tell you exactly what pages we’ve seen as referrers. Both methods can be narrowed down by both date or photo id if you want to filter the results more.

But wait! There’s more!

So far we’ve only talked about detailed data for photos, because that’s all we’ve ever shown on the flickr stats pages. But, behind the scenes we’re also recording data for sets, collections and photostreams, so we’ve added API methods to get at this data too. Full details are available as part of the full API documentation.

Between them these new API methods give you programatic access to all of the data we’re recording as part of the stats system. So go ahead and make awesome things with them!