When you’re making programmatic purchases in real time, it’s important to be able to update your preferences as fast as possible. An ad industry blog post this week by AppNexus CEO (and experienced software engineer) Brian O’Kelley talks about how AppNexus cache updates were designed to quickly push user changes into production.

“Instead of sending the whole file out to each box on every update cycle, we only push out the changes. This dramatically reduces the amount of data that we have to send out each cache cycle, and means that we can update our caches as frequently as we want to. At the moment, any change you make through AppNexus Console or the AppNexus API is live on every server in three minutes or less.”

Read more at How Real Time Is Your RTB Platform.

As part of our ongoing effort to engage with the local and national tech communities, I am thrilled to announce the launch of AppNexus’ public Tech Talk series.  We have two exciting presentations coming up.

The AppNexus Tech Talk events are completely free and open to the public.  However, space is limited so please RSVP to guarantee your spot!

Kicking off the series, Pete Emerson, Senior Director of Technical Operations for AppNexus, will present “Parallel Asynchronous Command Execution: Intro to Redis & ZeroMQ” tomorrow February 15 from 6:30 to 8pm at AppNexus’ New York headquarters. Pete will present simple code he’s written to execute arbitrary commands and code across many servers quickly.  If you’d like to test drive the technologies in advance of his talk, see the links below.

http://redis.io/download
http://www.zeromq.org/intro:get-the-software

Parallel Asynchronous Command Execution: Intro to Redis & ZeroMQ
Presenter: Pete Emerson, Senior Director of Technical Operations, AppNexus 
When: Wednesday, February 15 – 6:30 to 8pm
Where: AppNexus – 28 West 23^rd Street, 5^th Floor (between Fifth & Sixth Avenues)
Food and beverage will be provided
RSVP

On Wednesday, February 22 from 7pm to 9pm AppNexus’ Samy Bahra will present “An Introduction to Lock-Free Algorithms.” Samy is a senior software engineer on the AppNexus ad server team, and he’s finding that lock-free algorithms are playing an increasingly crucial role in our real-time advertising platform.

Though many of the concepts explored in Samy’s talk will be language-agnostic, it is recommended that those attending have an intermediate to advanced familiarity with C or C++, as well as a familiarity with multi-threaded programming.

Samy will cover non-blocking algorithm design and implementation. Lock-free synchronization allows concurrent systems to exude composibility, scalability, and resilience in ways impossible (in theory and in practice) when using traditional lock-based synchronization methods. Lock-free algorithms may receive plenty of inappropriate hype, but those attending Samy’s Tech Talk session will leave with the ability to determine when, where, and how to best use lock-free data structures and algorithms in real-world systems. Attendees will also receive a wealth of valuable resources for continued learning after the session.

An Introduction to Lock-Free Algorithms
Presenter: Samy Bahra, Senior Software Engineer, AppNexus
When: Wednesday, February 22 – 7 to 9pm
Where: AppNexus – 28 West 23^rd Street, 5^th Floor (between Fifth & Sixth Avenues)
Food and beverages will be provided
RSVP

We hope to see you at one (or both!) of these upcoming events.  We’ll be posting details on future AppNexus Tech Talks here on our tech blog, so be sure to check back soon!

I can never remember the right argument order when creating symlinks. Does the link go on the left… or… wait… the right? It’s annoying to keep looking this up, so today I forced myself to think of a way to remember it. I ended up settling on the “Left Side, Strong Side” line from Remember The Titans. Obviously the real thing is stronger than the link, so that goes on the left:

ln -s real_file name_of_link