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A month from now, the first Netlog Developer day will be held. On this one-day, free admission event we’ll be discussing oa. the OpenSocial API, the gaming platform and monetization possibilities on Netlog.

OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.
Netlog is one of the social networks supporting this standard. So, if you’re interested in developing social applications and while-doing-that would like to learn a little more about Netlog, this event is for you. Topics will also include performance and scaling, giving you an insight on how a site like Netlog is built.

In the afternoon there will be a codelab, where Google and Netlog developers will help you out experimenting with the available API’s.
Parallel with the codelab, there will also be a “Brand Integration Day”, where creative agencies and media buyers are invited to learn all about leveraging Netlog’s Brand Integration Platform and key customers will share their experience with Netlog.

A lot has happened during the past months, and we continue to work on improving our platform – for users and partners alike. We’d be thrilled to see you on April 2 to learn what we’ve done and share some of your thoughts.

The Developer Day kicks off at 9 am on April 2nd at Kinepolis in Brussels. Interested? Register here.

Keep an eye on the Netlog Developer blog for more info.

This article accompanies the slides from a presentation on database sharding. Sharding is a technique used for horizontal scaling of databases we are using at Netlog. If you’re interested in high performance, scalability, MySQL, php, caching, partitioning, Sphinx, federation or Netlog, read on …

This presentation was given at the second day of FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels. FOSDEM is an annual conference on open source software with about 5000 hackers. I was invited by Kris Buytaert and Lenz Grimmer to give a talk in the MySQL Dev Room. The talk was based on an earlier talk I gave at BarcampGent 2.

Overview

• Who am I?
• What is Netlog?
• A history of scaling database systems
• Hitting limits
• Sharding basics
• Sharding schemes
• Implications
• Existing solutions
• Implementation
• Tackling the problems
• Final thoughts
• Slides
• Resources

More… »

This saturday (nov 29th), Johan Ronsse, is hosting a second edition of BarCamp, at the IBBT building in Ghent, Belgium. BarCamp is an "ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment". This "un-conference" with discussions, demos and interaction from the participants, is a great way to meet some of the local people in our industry. There’s always a good dose of talented people around, so we’re looking forward to share and learn …

At the last edition in 2007, Lennart and Jurriaan spoke about frontend best practices. This time a few more of the Netlog developers and designers will be present, giving talks about HTML5, iPhone development, Sphinx, Memcached and sharding.

In "HTML5, In a big nutshell", Lennart – lead web designer at Netlog – will introduce us to the next version of html. And there’s plenty of cool stuff to get excited about! An overview of Web Forms 2.0 and Web Applications 1.0, will get you up to date on the current draft of new tags as <m>, <progress> and <video>.
Fresh from releasing the first version of Netlog’s iPhone app, Lieven will do an introductory talk on mobile development for the iPhone, with a few insights on how we tried to get it right building Netlog’s app.
Jayme and Jurriaan will shed some light on a few of the more advanced performance techniques we’re using here at Netlog. We’ll explain a practical example of a horizontally federated database system (sharding), and how we tackle some of its issues with Sphinx and Memcached.

A few of the other presentation we’re looking forward to include: "Chinese Internet Market Overview", Mollom, GIT and "UTF-8: The Secret of Character Encoding".

The BarCamp attendee list is full, but keep an eye out for barcamp related blog posts and presentations, on this blog and the rest of the interwebs. Full details on #barcampghent over at barcampgent2.wikispaces.com.