from __future__ import *

I don't often post about open jobs at Mochi Media on my blog, but it seems that most of the awesome people we have here found out about Mochi Media from me so I might as well ;)

Web development at Mochi Media happens primarily in Python and Pylons with Genshi templates. We're currently using mostly MochiKit for the JavaScript heavy lifting and we talk to all of our backend services (which are either Python or Erlang) via JSON. We're using a bunch of other cool technologies such as memcached, nginx, PostgreSQL, etc. We also often contribute a lot of what we do back to the open source community (e.g. MochiKit, MochiWeb, simplejson, etc.) and would love adding some more team members that were interested in helping out with our open source efforts too! We don't require experience with all of these frameworks and tools, we just need smart people that have a really solid understanding of web development in Python.

Mochi Media runs MochiAds, a monetization platform for Flash games, and MochiBot, an analytics service for Flash content... so we've got tons and tons of data to work with and very interesting scale problems to address. Our primary service, MochiAds, is a monetization platform for Flash games... so part of the responsibilities of being a Mochi employee is to approve all the latest in Flash games for paid advertisements from our network ;) There's even an internal competition to see who approves the most games each week! You can check some of them out at http://www.mochiads.com/games/

Mochi Media was founded in 2005 by Jameson Hsu and myself, and we're backed by Accel Partners and Shasta Ventures. We've got a great team and are always looking to add the best people we can find. If you kick ass at Python and love building cool apps for the web, talk to us!

This position is full-time and on-site in San Francisco, CA. We're very easily accessible by BART and Caltrain in SOMA, at 2nd st. and Mission st. More evidence that Mochi Media is a cool place to work can be found on the mochimedia Flickr photostream: http://flickr.com/photos/mochimedia

More info and application instructions are here: http://www.mochimedia.com/about/careers/#webengineer

Slides from my Ad Serving in Erlang talk at CUFP 2008 are available here: http://undefined.org/cufp2008/

I had a great time at ICFP and CUFP and it was really inspiring to see what other people are doing with functional programming. I look forward to attending in the future! I think I'll have to write an app in Haskell first though, so I can understand more of the ICFP talks ;)

If you're interested in Erlang I also recommend that you check out my other erlang posts particularly the video and slides from my Exploring Erlang @ C4[1] talk!

I had the privilege last night of going to Google's Campfire One where the Google App Engine was launched, which is basically a service that I've been secretly hoping that Google would release for the past three years. App Engine is going to change everything -- as soon as they come up with a pricing model, anyway. I'm sure whatever it is will be more than competitive with Amazon's offerings, which isn't really worth any price given that they can't keep it fully operational. Yesterday was the perfect day for EC2 to fall over again, they might as well shut it off altogether once Google gets this service into production ;)

So why does Google App Engine change everything? I don't have a lot of time to spend here but a few key points:

• Single sign-on for Google users. Everyone with a gmail account is already registered for your service. You have no idea how cool this actually is :)
• BIGTABLE. My god. I would've spent in excess of $100k to have access to this part of Google's infrastructure and saved money. Scaling SQL databases sucks. If you have the kind of access patterns that we do, databases designed for OLTP are simply not suitable and it's a real pain to try and make it work. The fact that schema is managed directly in the code and that schema upgrades look awfully painless is a huge extra bonus.
• Works locally, deploys globally
• Python and WSGI!
• No more going to the data center, provisioning bandwidth from telcos, etc.
• Payment is surely coming. No more PayPal or Verisign or whatever.

In the same way that Google Apps (and Mac OS X) have enabled people to run without IT departments, Google App Engine is going to let them go big without an ops department. With the current imposed limits I can't prove this theory at Mochi Media, since everything we do is beyond the scale of their current quotas, but maybe I'll allocate some of my "infinite spare time" to ditch this Wordpress crap and try it out for my blog while they sort that out :)

The minus is that this project is actually probably pretty horrible for open source. Yahoo and the rest of the Hadoop team have their work cut out in making that stack competitive with this. If they don't, Google is going to own scale for a while. While MySQL and PostgreSQL still have some years left in them as people learn how to write scalable apps, I can't see that model lasting very long now that you don't have to be in Google's employ to use better solutions to the data problem.

It's hard to believe that almost a year has gone by since we launched the first private beta of MochiAds, but we just relaunched the site last night and the doors are wide open now! Every user of MochiBot already has an account via our MochiPass single sign-on, and anyone else can sign up and get in instantly. You can start making money with your Flash games today!

It's been quite a ride so far -- this time last year Jameson and I were working out of our apartment in the Mission with Ryan freelancing all of the design. Fast forward through a round of venture financing and a tremendous uptake by game developers and here we are with our own floor of office space in SoMa (so much space that we're subletting to three other startups) and 12 people on payroll. We've even got a team who writes Erlang code every day, who else can say that? :)

Oh, and we're hiring people of all sorts, so if you're interested in working at a cool startup in San Francisco with a real business model (and revenue, today), cool technology, and a LOT of potential then please get in touch! You'll even get to play cool Flash games every day, because "reviewing" them is part of our job :)