Scribd is a top 100 site on the web and one of the largest sites built using Ruby on Rails. As one of the first rails sites to reach scale, we’ve built a lot of infrastructure and solved a lot of challenges to get Scribd to where it is today. We actively try to push the envelope and have contributed substantial work back to the open source community.
Scribd has an agile, startup culture and an unusually close working relationship between engineering and ops. You’ll regularly find cross-over work at Scribd, with ops people writing application-layer code and engineers figuring out operations-level problems. We think we’re able to make that work because of the uniquely talented people we have on the team.
To allow us to keep scaling, we’re now looking to add a strong, experienced operations guru to the team. As a member of Scribd operations, you’ll have tremendous ownership and responsibility for one of the web’s most popular applications. Because Scribd is a startup, you will wear many hats and have broader responsibility than you would at a larger company.
If you read this blog, you should already have a good sense of the kind of work you’ll be doing on this position.
The Ideal Profile
You are an experienced operations professional and have run ops at at least one large-scale website. You have comprehensive knowledge of a broad variety of system tools, from MySQL and Nginx to Squid and Memcached. You should also have strong software development skills and be well-versed in major programming languages. You should be strongly motivated, a creative solution finder, and ready to jump into the thorniest technical problems whenever necessary.
Responsibilities
- Develop and maintain all aspects of Scribd’s operations infrastructure, including system monitoring, backups, server configuration, databases, and caching systems
- Collaborate with engineering to create next generation infrastructure to support changing requirements
- Predict scaling problems before they occur and work with engineering to prevent them
- Write and debug application level ruby code
- Participate in an on-call rotation
- Quickly diagnose server problems and employ preventive measures to maintain high availability servers
Qualifications
- Bachelors degree in CS or equivalent experience
- 3-5 years of professional experience in site operations
- Strong software engineering skills, including knowledge of major programming languages
- Strong database skills, preferably with MySQL, and overall linux knowledge
- Experience with most of the following technologies: MySQL, Nginx, Ruby, Memcached, Squid, git, Solr, HBase, Postfix
- Proven ability to quickly learn and implement unfamiliar technologies
- Strong desire to work hard at a rapidly growing company
Location: You are preferably located near San Francisco, CA. Relocation assistance is designed on a per-case basis. In short, we’ll be creative to get you here.
Contact: Please send your email cover letter and resume with the subject “Your name – Senior Site Operations Engineer – via Kovyrin.net” to jobs@scribd.com or contact me directly using any of my contacts. All communication and correspondence is held in the strictest confidence to ensure that you can connect and learn more without exposure.
My wife – a good web designer with 6 years of experience with web design, HTML and CSS is looking for a job. Here is some information about her:
We’re physically located in Toronto, Canada, but she has a great experience of working remotely too. So, if you need a web designer or a junior web designer, feel free to contact Tanya.
loops is a small and lightweight framework for Ruby on Rails and Merb created to support simple background loops in your application which are usually used to do some background data processing on your servers (queue workers, batch tasks processors, etc).
Originally loops plugin was created to make our (Scribd.com) own loops code more organized. We used to have tens of different modules with methods that were called with script/runner and then used with nohup and other not so convenient backgrounding techniques. When you have such a number of loops/workers to run in background it becomes a nightmare to manage them on a regular basis (restarts, code upgrades, status/health checking, etc).
After a short time of writing our loops in more organized ways we were able to generalize most of the loops code so now our loops look like a classes with a single mandatory public method called run. Everything else (spawning many workers, managing them, logging, backgrounding, pid-files management, etc) is handled by the plugin itself.
The major idea behind this small project was to create a deadly simple and yet robust framework to be able to run some tasks in background and do not think about spawning many workers, restarting them when they die, etc. So, if you need to be able to run either one or many copies of your worker or you do not want to think about re-spawning dead workers and do not want to spend megabytes of RAM on separate copies of Ruby interpreter (when you run each copy of your loop as a separate process controlled by monit/god/etc), then I’d recommend you to try this framework — you’ll like it.
For more information, visit the project site and, of course, read the sources 
Few days ago we were chatting in our corporate Campfire room and one of the guys asked me what do I think about Rails developers hiring process, what questions I’d ask a candidate, etc… This question started really long and interesting discussion and I’d like to share my thoughts on this question in this post.
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Since I wasn’t able to get to this year’s MySQL UC (employer change caused problems with US visa obtaining and I didn’t get visa in time) I’m really interested in all presentations people are posting after their sessions. I decided to collect them all in one place and would like to share with others – maybe someone will find it interesting to read what people have to say about many interesting aspects of MySQL usage.
So, I’ve created a folder in my Scribd.com account which you could use (and track using RSS readers) to find out what interesting presentations were published. You can use either my account or mysqluc08 folder there. One more possible option to track mysqluc presentations/documents is using our tagging (I tag all my docs with mysqluc08 tag).
Thanks to MySQL community members we’ve got really great collection of media files from the recent mysqluc. Thanks to Seeri for all that work he’s done to collect everything in one place so we could watch/listen/read information from this great event.
So, if you did not attended mysqluc07, then you definitely should visit Technocation page, dedicated to this conference.
P.S. I’m going to post links to these videos and descriptions for the sessions on the Best Tech Videos soon, so If you are not sure to watch some video or not, just wait while I’m merging these links with information from mysqluc site.
I think nobody would argue today, that search engines are most import sites in todays Internet. There are lots of information sources in the Net today, and every day they are generating lots of useful content. One of major parts of this content is generated by forums aka bulletin boards. But Google – most popular search engine is not to efficient on this side of search – if you try to find something using Google, you can find information on some public forum, but Google SERP is designed for generic pages search and search results will be not so clear. That is why more specialized search engines are so popular. Technorati, Google and Yahoo blog search engines, etc are really popular today.
Just few days ago new search engine was released. Its name is Board Reader. IMHO, its major advantage of this search engine is specialization on search by forums. Its SERP has been designed to display search results in really convenient way which is specific for forums (message threading model). Its index is not littety by all these doorway sites, etc, etc. So, I think this site would grow really fast especially if they would keep working on their services extending. As for me, I’d like to give them a try and will use this search engine for my forums specific search requests.
Today I dugg interesting site with not so many, but useful books about programming. There are 18 different sections all if which contains free books about some programming language.
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Red Hat company has recently opened its Knownedge Base – great collection of answers to frequently asked questions about linux systems. You no longer need to login to access it.
Red Hat Knowledgebase is a library of tips, troubleshooting advice, and current information updated daily by Red Hat technicians.
As for me, it is great news, because RHKB is one of the best libraries with information about linux systems.
Some days ago I came across interesting resource from Google. They are providing free access to video recordings from the some of their Educational seminars.
As far as I understand, these seminars has been provided by Google for their staff and now all of us can get them via Google Video service.
By the way, when I have decided to view some of that interesting seminars, it was not wery confortable for me to view them in browser window… and I have googled 
for some method to save video from google to local disk. As the result of my seraching, I got great service, that allows saving any clip from Google Video, Youtube or iFilm services to local disk!
And now, you have link to very interesting collection of video clips and you know the metod how to save it to local disc… the last I need to do is to say: “Happy viewing!”
