Autumn Technology Forum: focus on web development

On October 17, we will have an autumn Mail.Ru Group 2012 Technology Forum . 24 speakers were invited to the Autumn Forum, reports will be held in 3 streams.



We are holding the Technology Forum for the fourth time. In the spring we made a special version of the Forum for system administrators. This fall, as well as last , the theme will be web development, in the broadest sense.
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I would like to introduce you to topics and speakers, technologies and ideas. We invited several interesting Western speakers to the Forum. We will tell a lot about what for the first time, you are waiting for live demonstrations and master classes. In this post I would like to introduce you to the topics that will be raised this time, and with our speakers.

Ask questions in the comments - the speakers still have time to take them into account in their presentations. And prepare questions for the Forum, we love and appreciate them very much. Participation is free, but the number of places is limited, registration is required and will close soon.


Maxim BABICH , Head of the Money Mail.Ru project development department, will tell you how Mail.Ru Money is arranged inside, how to make such a system scalable and fault-tolerant, and what problems are not typical for other high-load services.

Especially this knowledge will be useful to those who develop projects related to e-commerce (including payment aggregators, billing systems, etc.).

Money Mail.Ru is a payment system that currently processes hundreds of thousands of transactions per day. Previously, almost no information was published about the Money.Ru device. Over the past year, this service has grown very seriously and has become stronger. If you are interested in any specific aspects of the construction of a payment system, please write in the comments - we will try to touch on these topics in the report.


Denis ANIKIN , Technical Director of Mail.Ru Mail, will make a report on the experience of launching HTTPS in Mail.Ru Mail. The well-known HTTP traffic encryption technology used in browsers and servers for more than 15 years has been fully used relatively recently on busy global projects and services. In these questions - a lot of subtleties associated with setting up SSL / nginx, adaptation and twisting the server software. Denis will gladly share all this information in his report.

Denis knows many technological intricacies and is responsible for the work of the fourth in the world in terms of attendance of the postal service.

At the last Technology Forum, Denis talked about how Mail.Ru withstand high loads .


Alexey MASHANOV , the leading programmer of the social network My World, will tell you how to centrally collect logs from a cluster in almost real time. This problem is relevant even for a small group of servers working on the same task, what to do when there are hundreds or thousands of servers? For this, there are a number of finished products, and Alexey will tell you why the Scribe log server was chosen from among them.

Scribe is a real-time log aggregator developed by Facebook and transmitted to Open Source in 2008.

Alexey has been working at Mail.Ru Group since 2010, he is engaged in optimization, statistics, and improvement of the technical processes of the social network “My World”.


Boris WOLFSON - Technical Director of HeadHunter. His report at the Technology Forum will focus on the balance between quality and efficiency of the release of new features. The need to maintain this balance is in front of each development manager. Boris in his report will share the systematic approach adopted in Headhunter.

Ward Cunningham coined the term “Technical Debt” ( wiki , habrahabr ) for this situation. According to this metaphor, a quick and careless addition of functionality leads us to a technical debt, which the inventor of the wiki technology compares with a financial debt. Many teams, increasing technical debt, fall into the “debt hole” and eventually slow down the speed of their work. Boris will tell why and in what situations technical debt appears and how it can be purposefully reduced. This report will be of particular interest to technical managers.


Pavlo BARON , leading architect of the German consulting company Codecentric , will talk about how to build distributed systems to work with large amounts of data. Pavlo often speaks at IT conferences around the world and is the author of three books: Erlang / OTP, Pragmatic IT Architecture and Fragile Agile. The report itself will be related to Big Data, but on the sidelines, Pavlo will be happy to share his knowledge and experience in other issues, where he is a recognized expert - Erlang / OTP, Agile, Java.

Pavlo will speak in English, we will provide simultaneous translation. Along the way, it turned out that our speaker has old Ukrainian roots, and he is slightly familiar with Russian. So it is possible that the audience and Pavlo will begin to understand each other much faster than is usually the case with the participation of a translator.


Alexey VOROPAEV , the head of the project ranking department for Mail.Ru Search, will reveal the topic of machine learning: what it is, how it works, and whether it can be applied in your projects. Alexey will talk about popular machine learning algorithms with and without a teacher, and will also show examples of their use (including in the Mail.Ru Search project).

Before becoming the head of the ranking department, Alexey was engaged in the development of a search server and an indexer. Prior to Mail.Ru Group, Alexey worked on a distributed enterprise-level traffic analyzer at Perimetrix .

The report will be especially useful for programmers and analysts who deal with large amounts of data.


Sergi MANSILLA , lead developer at Ajax.org , will give a talk on “Architecting Node.js JavaScript for Large-Scale Projects”.

Cergy is a recognized JavaScript expert and leads the Cloud9 IDE development team in Amsterdam, one of the most well-known online Node.js development environments.

Prior to this, Sergy worked as a senior developer at TomTom , where he led a team involved in building a JavaScript framework for user interfaces.


Victor STARODUB , Mail.Ru Mail programmer, will tell you about the experience in implementing the IMAP protocol in the server part of Mail.

The IMAP protocol replaced POP3 twenty years ago, but despite this, it is a "tough nut to crack" for large mail services. First of all, because the number of mail clients, multiplied by the complexity of the standard, makes it necessary to take into account many exceptions in the logic of the server. Secondly, the IMAP principle itself implies a permanent connection between the client and the server, unlike session POP3. In the case of millions of connections per hour, this feature becomes a problem. Victor will tell about solutions of this and other problems in his report.


Luka Garrulli , CEO of NuvolaBase Ltd , will talk about how to create a fault-tolerant replicable cluster database, which allows for easy scaling only by adding new nodes to the cluster.

Luca is the author of the OrientDB DBMS, a graphical, document-oriented database of the NoSQL class, 100% implemented in Java. It supports an object-oriented database interface that runs on top of a document-oriented layer. Implemented a powerful query language based on SQL, cluster architecture, master-master replication, full support for ACID transactions, natively supports HTTP, RESTful and JSON protocols without using third-party components, supports server-side scripting. For a series of tests on conventional equipment, OrientDB allows you to save 150,000 records per second. When testing performance, one server with OrientDB was able to replace 125 MySQL servers (of course, on specific queries).


Alexey ROMANENKO , lead programmer of the Mail.Ru Search project, in his report will reveal the features of processing large amounts of data using parallel computing in Hadoop- based clusters.

The MapReduce software model has recently become increasingly popular in the context of processing large amounts of data. It is great for tasks that can be divided into parts (distributing them to different servers, and then combining the processing results). The report will discuss typical problems arising from the transfer of standard algorithms to a distributed environment, as well as ways to solve them and practical implementations on the example of the Hadoop / MapReduce framework.


Andrei PANGIN , lead programmer of the Odnoklassniki social network, is preparing a report on the experience of the social network in implementing its own solutions on the Java platform. Classmates are one of the largest public services in the world, built on this technology. The report discusses the shortcomings of existing networking mechanisms, caching and serialization in Java and offers alternative solutions based on the undocumented features of the Java platform, native libraries, dynamic bytecode generation, and its own algorithms developed by Odnoklassniki.

Andrey is engaged in the software platform underlying the portal services, specializing in data storage and transmission systems. Prior to that, he worked for 6 years at Sun Microsystems, developing Java virtual machines, from CLDC HI to HotSpot JVM. Perhaps he is the same person who knows everything about Java. If your project works in Java or you consider Java as a platform for a future large project, you will definitely find many useful things in Alexey’s report.


Dmitry Yudin , the VoIP Lab lead developer of the Mail.Ru Group's IM division , will give a presentation on the voice and video transmission problems that his team faced when designing a VoIP engine that provides audio / video communication inside Mail.Ru Agent . The previous publications on Habré showed great interest in this topic. We hope that everyone who wants to get answers to their questions will be able to do this in person at the Technology Forum.

Prior to joining the Mail.Ru Group, Dmitry Yudin worked for about 10 years on a similar task at Spirit DSP , which specialized in voice and video products via IP channels.


Sergey SPIRIDONOV , the head of the Allods Online server development team, will talk about how the Allods Online server works, about the architecture and development features. A number of architectural decisions taken during the development will be considered, their advantages and disadvantages will be analyzed.


Yaroslav RABOVOLYUK , Head of the Information Security Department of Mail.Ru Group, at the Forum will talk about client-side vulnerabilities. Yaroslav will talk about typical attacks, countermeasures, programming practices and project deployment to minimize the likelihood of vulnerabilities or protect web applications from their influence.

At the last Forum, the reports of Yaroslav gathered full halls (slides and video reports External control of system security , Practical use of cryptographic Unix tools ).

This year we have a whole stream devoted to the development of a frontend.


Andrei Sumin , head of development at the frontend Mail.Ru Group, will make a presentation on the experience of connecting “themes” to the Mail interface. Everything connected with the personalization of the interface always requires a good design and a weighted approach.

At the last forum, Andrew talked about how to properly organize the storage and use of Javascript files .


Konstantin LEBEDEV , Mail.Ru Mail programmer, will tell you how to make a multifunctional browser-based file uploader that allows you to create a preview of images, read ID3 tags and much more. This functionality is an important component of many projects, and even when using any ready-made libraries, ignorance of many details can lead to problems in security and performance.


Vladimir Krenin , deputy head of development at frontend, will share his experience in automating workflow. Task tracker, project management system - tools designed to facilitate teamwork. Many use them, but not all - with pleasure. Vladimir will tell you how to organize a workflow without drowning in formalism: principles for building a workflow, common mistakes, examples of implementation.

It will be interesting and useful, first of all, to timlids and project managers, developers who doubt the feasibility of implementing and using task trackers.


Roman MITASOV , the leading developer of a web-messenger, will tell about the peculiarities of web-client development for Mail.Ru Agent , about pros and cons, the pitfalls of client data storage, about interface synchronization, about interwindow router, how to keep one connection on all windows of the user.


In the report of Vadim MAKEEV , the web evangelist of Opera Software, we will hear about how to create websites that take into account the high resolution of displays of mobile and not quite mobile devices. Measures, half measures and just tricks to make your site look perfect - in this report.


Vyacheslav EGOROV , Google’s Software Engineer, will reveal how V8, the JavaScript engine on which Chromium-based browsers and Node.js servers are built, works. Vyacheslav will also dwell on how you can turn the knowledge about the internal structure of the V8 to your advantage.


Ivan CHASHKIN , Mail.Ru Mail programmer, and Egor DYDYKIN , a frontend developer, will talk about “Graceful degradation” using the example of the Mail.Ru mobile Mail touch interface.

The story dates back to the distant 1994, when site content for advanced browsers was presented in a full-fledged form, and development was focused on it, and for obsolete, but at that time occupying a significant market share, in a simplified one. Today we have a similar situation - the army of mobile users is growing, the principles of organizing the user interface for them are increasingly at odds with the "classics", and more and more website developers are forced to seek a balance between convenience and complexity.


Igor ERMAKOV , director of Instant Messengers Mail.Ru Group, will devote his report to the typical problems of managing a large team of developers.

A year ago, at the Technology Forum, Igor talked about how services, tools and technologies for web development in Mail.Ru were developing . We published the transcript of this report in Habré.


Konstantin OSIPOV , head of the Tarantool developer department , will talk about disk storage algorithms in Tarantool , an open NoSQL database developed by Mail.Ru Group.

Last time at the Forum, Konstantin talked more about Tarantool (slides and video - " Tarantool: how to handle 1.5 billion requests per day? + Transcript of a report on Habré , Tarantool: system administration practice ) and MySQL ( New features of MySQL 5.5: a look system administrator ). Konstantin Osipov is a high-class programmer, a specialist in database management systems. The Mail.Ru Group is developing a high-performance data warehouse Tarantool / Box. He is one of the founders and active participants of the Moscow MySQL User Group, from 2003 to 2010 was one of wasp Ovnyh MySQL database developers and participated in the creation of many opportunities 4.1, 5.0, 5.1 and 5.5. Prior to Mail.Ru Group Konstantin worked at Oracle, Sun, MySQL, RingRows, SpyLOG, InterPro ...




The story about the Forum 2011 is here , about spring, for system administrators - here . It will be even better and more interesting. Come, we are waiting for you! Participation is free, but the number of places is limited, registration is required and will close soon.

Aliyev Rauf,
Director of Research and Education
Mail.Ru Group