developing meebo

some interesting stuff on their blog. I’m not entirely clear on their purpose, but it looks like cool stuff.

Working on group projects at school and for fun taught us a lot about organization and how important it is to have systems in place that make you more efficient. We started out using CVS as source control (even with only 3 people, typing rm -rf * is too easy) but then switched over to Subversion. Atomic changes are great and working with branches is so much easier.

Setting up a backup system is key too; you don’t want to lose all of your work! We home-brewed a nightly backup script that keeps the code repository safe, as well as the blog and forum. Speaking of scripts, they make life so much easier :) With so many servers, it’s a pain to have to do things by hand — automation helps a lot. We have an assortment of scripts, from release scripts to server load monitoring scripts.

That brings me to statistics (Elaine loves statistics). We currently use RRD, awstats, cacti, and various other tools that help us keep track of how we’re doing in terms of load, growth, and overall health of the system. It also gives us something to share with everyone.