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+Today I assisted to two tech. talks. One of them was our "Reading Group"
+session at lunch and the second one was the Python meetup tonight.
+
+** Say's tech talk
+
+I'm trying to organize at [[http://saymedia.com][work]], every two weeks
+during lunch time, a session where engineers can discuss about an
+article, tool, or paper they find interesting. Today we were a very
+small group (only 4 peoples), and we talked about two tools that
+[[http://sekimura.typepad.com/blog/][Masa]] wanted to explore:
+[[https://github.com/cookpad/kage][Kage]] and
+[[http://www.igvita.com/2012/08/28/web-performance-power-tool-http-archive-har/][HTTP
+Archive]].
+
+*** Kage
+
+We talked about Kage first (kah-geh means "shadow" in Japanese). Masa
+started to explain what was the goal of the tool and how it works.
+Basically, it's a proxy that will send your HTTP request to your
+production and stage environment. The basic
+[[https://github.com/cookpad/kage/blob/master/examples/proxy.rb][example]]
+show how easy it is to write a simple proxy with a few rules to dispatch
+only your GET request to your two environments, and then compare the
+payload returned.
+
+It's using [[https://github.com/igrigorik/em-proxy/][em-proxy]] which is
+a DSL to write proxy for EventMachine. We then discussed where we could
+use it in our architecture and what benefit we could get from it, but
+for now we don't have any plan to use it.
+
+*** HAR
+
+Then the second thing we talked about what HAR. You can find more
+detailed information on
+[[http://www.igvita.com/2012/08/28/web-performance-power-tool-http-archive-har/][Ilya's
+blog]] and on this [[https://gist.github.com/3500508][gist]]. To
+summarize, HAR is an HTTP archive
+[[http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/har-12-spec/][format]]. When you
+use the developers tools in Chrome, you can see the request and their
+response time, but you can also save this information in the HAR format.
+
+There's a few tools then to analyse this data, like YSlow, or browse
+them with the HARviewer. Another interesting thing is that you don't
+have to use a browser to get them, you can use
+[[http://phantomjs.org][Phantomjs]]. Masa and Kyle talked about it and
+if they could use that with Nagios, or with Jenkins to measure the
+response time.
+
+** SF Python Meetup
+
+The last talk of the day was the [[http://www.meetup.com/sfpython/][SF
+Python Meetup]] after a 4 or 5 months break, at the Yelp headquarter. We
+were supposed to have some lightning talks to start, but we only had
+one, from someone who think that "lightning talk" means "publicity for
+Google and ho by the way, we're hiring" (yeah like no one in the room
+knew that ...).
+
+Then David Schachter presented
+[[http://www.rtortell.com/SF_Python_Meetup_slides_public.pdf][How to
+Speed Up A Python Program 114,000 times]]. He showed us how he improved
+the performance of a script by 114,000 times. I will start by saying the
+talk was interesting and that David was an entertaining speaker. He went
+through some optimization he used, like using multiprocessing modules,
+[[http://cython.org][cython]], and some more difficult optimization he
+was not able to get from cython (like the permuted vector code).
+
+He had a very strong opinion about cluster and I really disagree with
+him. One of his complains was that cluster are hard, are young, and we
+don't have any tools, so we should not use them. But we've been using
+cluster in universities and laboratories for years now. Even if the
+tools are still not very great, they exist, and they work. And more
+importantly to me, the fact that he spend 12 weeks on optimizing his
+program, and doing stuff that I would not be able to do, he proved that
+optimizing is /also/ very hard, and that doesn't seem easier to me that
+using a cluster.
+
+All in all, that was a good day, and I learned new things. Now I need to
+find a subject for our next reading group session.