Since it was Father’s Day here in Sweden yesterday – yes we know it varies around the world – we thought we’d pay homage to some of the people behind the Internet as we know it today.

Some of the obvious choices would include Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn for TCP/IP, Vannevar Bush for much of the conceptual thinking behind the Internet, Ted Nelson for coining the word hypertext, Tim Berners-Lee for the World Wide Web, Marc Andreeseen for co-authoring Mosaic, and many others.

But why go for the obvious? We thought it would be fun to give some credit to a few lesser-known contributors to some technology or product that is a part of Internet history. These are guys who have made important contributions that affect us all but that may not have received the same accolades as others. So even though this didn’t exactly turn out to be a Father’s Day post, let’s take a look.

Read more

The open source movement is a popular one, and it’s certainly made its mark on the software landscape. But where has it made its biggest mark? What is the most successful open source endeavor of all time?

Actually, when you see it as a whole, isn’t the Web the biggest open source success of them all?

Perhaps the most famous example is the LAMP stack that lies behind so many websites, i.e. Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. But there’s so much more when you think about it.

Here are some of the open source projects that make the Web tick.

Read more

At the scale that Facebook operates, a lot of traditional approaches to serving web content break down or simply aren’t practical. The challenge for Facebook’s engineers has been to keep the site up and running smoothly in spite of handling close to half a billion active users. This article takes a look at some of the software and techniques they use to accomplish that.

Read more

Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.

And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.

Read more

Since the dawn of technology people have been arguing about which technology is better. As with all such debates there are usually no simple answers and it often comes down to personal taste.

These discussions tend to be very infected due to the almost religious belief shown by the most hardcore supporters of a technology, a thorough conviction that all other options are inferior. Sometimes the technology creators themselves also add fuel to the fire by joining the discussions.

Read more

We ran across a very creative use of Pingdom monitoring the other day. Most people use Pingdom to monitor the status of websites and servers, but Eric Nagel uses our monitoring service to keep track of the temperature in his outdoor hot tub (complete with rubber ducky).

Keep reading to learn how he did it.

Read more

We here at Pingdom have been talking about why we don’t see that many women in Open Source, and were actually about to investigate it further and possibly write a blog post about it. However, when we started to actually look around we were happily surprised. There are lots of women involved in Open Source! [...]

Read more

Today we enjoy websites that are full of content and services that let us take care of anything imaginable online (well, almost). But the ride to our “Web 2.0” world of today has taken quite a while. It has been about 14 years since the first web page with dynamic content was created. This is [...]

Read more

Have you ever wondered what technology some of the really big websites use? The likes of Digg, YouTube, Myspace and so on? There is a very interesting website called High Scalability that is dedicated to, as they put it themselves, “building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.” They collect information about the architecture of high-traffic websites [...]

Read more

The development team behind Pingdom is also responsible for Ipwalk, a service that keeps track of name server statistics (Ipwalk was recently mentioned in Phil Wainewright’s ZDNet SaaS blog). Needless to say, keeping track of all the name servers on the Internet takes up a lot of space, and we use PostgreSQL databases to store [...]

Read more