Congruency

I haven't written much here lately, having a bit difficulty figuring out what to do with this blog. My life isn't really that interesting to write about, and since I don't work at Opera anymore, work-related posts aren't all that easily written.

I'm currently sitting bored in the business lounge at the München airport, eager to get home after a week-long meeting in a NATO working group. While taking part in such a thing has indeed been interesting, but now I'm tired and really want to get home to my loved one.

Actually, for the last 2 months, I have lived in hotels on average every other day. Obviously, that includes the two-week vacation I wrote about in the previous post, however, there's been quite a lot of work-related travelling lately. Luckily, it won't be like that all the time... Travelling is tiresome..

Anyhow, the vacation went well. We covered a lot of central and southern Europe in two weeks, and had a great time. Unfortunately, the tour my girlfriend was participating in was cancelled in the eleventh hour, which sort of took half the point out of the trip for my part, but it was still great fun.

Mkay, I'll go surf around my.opera a bit now, getting at least some value for the €8 I spent on the wireless access (curse T-Mobile!)....

All good things come to an end, I guess, and now my role as Opera Community developer is no more.

While I have decided to move on to what I at least for now percieve as more challenging tasks, it is with certain regret that I have resigned my position at Opera Software. Developing the community these past couple of years has been very exciting and fun. The learning curve as our member mass increased and our servers collapsed has been steep, but as a result I've learned a tremendous amount of important database and server backend application skills. Unfortunately, I won't be using those skills in my new job though, considering I'm going from programming to more theoretical work assignments.

Having an MSc in Information Security it is with much anticipation and excitement (and some trepidation) I have agreed to a position as a theoretical cryptologist at the Norwegian National Security Authority. I look forward to the new challenges I will face, although I will most certainly miss being able to do mass-market stuff such as the Opera Community, where people will immediately tell you if you messed something up, or did something cool. Now, if I mess up, I'll only compromise national security


I still have a week left at Opera Software, which I will spend finishing up some community backend code, and to retroactively write some proper documentation of my past transgressions in Perl. It would be cool if those who come after will actually be able to maintain the community. Hopefully, you won't even notice I'm gone.

This week Opera Software sent Espen and myself on a MySQL customer conference, to learn a thing or two about MySQL and talk with the gurus.

Especially a couple of presentations by MySQL sales engineer Ivan Zoratti regarding performance and horizontal scalability options was very interesting and highly relevant to the Opera Community, where he gaves us some ideas about where our current solution is lacking.

Currently we have scaled horizontally by adding more nodes to our database server farm. However, due to the relatively little amount of RAM and parallel processing power of our current nodes, the solution is far from optimal. We have therefore decided to rather scale our master node vertically, that is add a lot of proper hardware.

The performance aspects of Zoratti's talks taught us a lot though, and I'll employ some of those tricks as soon as I can. And while we are scaling vertically this time, we'll need to think seriously about horizontal scaling in the future, given our current growth.

After the conference, Opera was conincidentally holding the Opera Backstage event, so we went there and grabbed a few free beers, and also got the opportunity to briefly say hello to some of our revered community members

Testing. 1 2 3.

Today's update introduces some fixes to the Opera Community which first and foremost will make our, the developers, life easier, rather than new cool features. We are paving the ground for easier implementation of new features, so to speak.

One of the biggest changes this time around is a complete rewrite of the login system, meaning that any old cookies which you may have in your browser are outdated and will not work. In other words, you'll need to log in again. Due to significant changes in the backend, you may need to request a new password. We apologize for this nuisance, however even though the old system wasn't unsecure, this system is more secure and will benefit all our users.

From now on, you can select to be logged in for one session only, or you can select to be permanently logged in (by ticking the "remember me" checkbox in the login form). Logging in for one session only entails that your browser will delete your login cookie and thereby log you out of the Opera Community when you close your browser or has been inactive for more than 30 minutes.

Aside from the login backend and other invisible changes, we have tried our best to optimise some stuff we know are sluggish; searching photo albums should be significantly faster, as well as listing the friends network.

On the the more noticable side of things, Fred has designed a couple of new gorgeous-looking themes for your enjoyment, along with a site header more coherent with our other sites.