Eleven Eleven Sale
Jack Ma’s Singles day sale was very interesting again. It topped RMB 120.7 billion ($17.79 billion US dollars / c16.6 billion euros) this year. Every year that number on the screen gets bigger.
The most interesting technology news from the Gala was their ‘Catch the Tmall Cat’ augmented reality game (like Pokemon go) and the new Buy+ VR shopping environment. The VR headsets are on Taobao for 1 yuan and works with a mobile phone (like cardboard).
The video is well worth a watch and really does seem like the future, admittedly through the lens of advertising. If you have a film company, or TV show, I would be contacting them right now for use of the technology.
They have an open source take on Nginx, called Tengine. You can check it out on Github. It’s being used for Aliexpress, Tmall and Taobao. Alibaba is running off Tengine and Apache-Coyote which must mean its all about the scale and performance. There is a huge load on both their cloud services and their servers at this time of year so they should be able to achieve good performance. Or if they can’t there is a lot of money for them in fixing that.
If you are currently working on a server right now, I would take a good look at Tengine and take it apart and compare the changes with Nginx. There are probably some really useful lessons in there that are not widely known outside of China.
(If you do this, I’d love to hear what you have to say about it)
This week I’ve been thinking about performance a lot. I’ve some plans with this website. To get it onto the new theme and onto https (might as well). I’ve given a talk this month on a testing framework in the Limerick Testing Meetup and I’ve a talk to give next month for my company. So its just a matter of timing.