My Last Day at eBay

Today is my last day at eBay. I have been there for nearly four years and it has been a remarkable experience. When I joined eBay, I had come from a startup called Ludi Labs. One thing I realized while at Ludi Labs was that "scalability" was largely a hypothetical term to me. I thought I understood the keys to making an application function at web scale, but it unfortunately it was very theoretical knowledge. None of the startups I had worked at had ever really hit that kind of scale. Hence my interest in working a large scale web company, like eBay.

Four years later and I realize how very limited my theoretical knowledge of scalability really was. Sure I understood the basic principles, but there are definitely many subtleties involved in implementing these principles. I won't now claim to be a scalability expert, but I have certainly learned some real world lessons.

When I first joined eBay, I worked with the infrastructure team on eBay's homegrown presentation technology. A lot of this technology was based on what works at scale: high volume web pages, working in dozens of different languages, running on servers spread across multiple data centers, and built by hundreds of engineers around the globe. I went on to help many of the different teams at eBay adopt and optimize their use of eBay's presentation technology. As such I got opportunities to work on many of the major pages of eBay: home page, search results, view item, my eBay, just to name a few. Often my experience was limited to helping the team solve some site speed issues, but I still got a chance to understand how each of these highly complex web pages could function at massive scale.

Of course the last couple of years of my career at eBay was dominated by mobile. It's been an exciting time, as our mobile team saw massive growth both in terms of users and their usage (measured using the best possible metric: money) as well as in terms of the team behind the technology. It's had some great moments as well, such as seeing eBay named by Fast Company as the #2 most innovative company in mobile.

This leads to the obvious question of why I am leaving eBay. The future for mobile at eBay is very bright. However it's one of those cases where the change is not about where I'm coming from, but about where I'm going. In this case that's Bump Technologies. I'm very excited about the opportunity at Bump. They already have a great product that they've built in just two years. However, I think that two years from now the current product will look very limited in comparison. It's going to be an exciting time.

eBay Mobile for Android

I have been working on mobile at eBay since the fall of 2008. Almost immediately upon joining the team, I started running my mouth about how we needed to create an Android application. At the time, the G1 had just come out, and let's be honest. It was definitely a cut below the iPhone -- the standard that all phones are measured against whether they like it or not. The development environment was attractive, but we had to be pragmatic about things. eBay Mobile for iPhone was a big hit, and we had tons of ides for improving it. So Android had to wait. Yesterday, the wait was over and eBay Mobile for Android became available for download from the Android Market. It requires Android 1.6, and we have not rolled it out in all of the countries that our iPhone app is available in, so depending on your device and your location, it may not yet show up in the Market. If you're on 1.6, just be patient, hopefully we'll be in your country soon. If you're on 1.0/1.1/1.5... well your carrier needs to upgrade you to 1.6 :-)

The app was the result of a lot of hard work by some very talented engineers. If you have an Android phone, then of course I am hoping you will go try it out. One of the cool features of the Android platform that we took advantage of is integration with the system level QuickSearch. This makes it possible for popular search terms on eBay to be automatically suggested to you as type in the QuickSearch box on the home screen of your phone. However, this is one of those kind of curious features in Android. It is relatively easy to do (though making it fast, for something dynamic like popular search terms on eBay, can be tricky -- our engineers did an awesome job on this), but it is not something that you can "enable" by default. What I mean is that any application can become a provider for the QuickSearch box, but the applications cannot get their suggestions to automatically appear. Instead the user must manually enable add the provider, and this is not the most obvious thing to do. To give you an idea, I did a short video that shows you how to do this:

See what I mean? It's hard to expect that most users will figure this out on their own. Maybe we could put some kind of message in the app instructing them how to do this, but it is not something you can really describe succinctly. Anyways, as you see in the video, one you add eBay to your list of search providers, the results from eBay will only appear at the bottom of the list of suggestions. Once again, it would be very easy for a user to not even know that they are there. If they scroll down and find them, and do this a few times, then supposedly Android is smart and starts putting the eBay results closer to the top of the list...

I think this is something that Android could definitely improve on, since I think it is a great idea to allow other apps to hook into the "global" search if you will. I can definitely imagine the Facebook app and various Twitter apps doing this too. However, one could understand if apps did not do this, given how difficult it is for an apps' contributions to surface in the search suggestions.

Eclipse Day Video

Couldn't make it to Eclipse Day? You're in luck. Since it was at Google, it was recorded and is now on YouTube. Enjoy!

Eclipse Day 2008

Congratulations to the Eclipse Foundation for releasing Ganymede today. As part of the festivities, Eclipse and Google collaborated on Eclipse Day yesterday. I was fortunate enough to be asked to speak at the event, and it was a great experience. I spoke about how we use Eclipse at eBay. The response was very enthusiastic with lots of folks amazed at how many tools we had built for our developers and how we had standardized tools across such a large development organization. I totally agree that our tools developers are amazing. For me, I don't know how we could survive without having all of the tools we have built! Here are the slides from my presentation, courtesy of SlideShare:

| View | Upload your own

I wanted to really thank Ian Skerrett from Eclipse for organizing everything. The folks at Google were excellent hosts, so I must also thank Robert Konigsberg from Google.

EclipseDay

I will be speaking at EclipseDay next month at Google. I will be talking about how we use Eclipse at eBay. I am going to try to demo and show off eBay's highly customized Eclipse-based development environment. Of course anytime you do a demo, you are at the mercy of the demo-gods! Hopefully they will be merciful.

eBay Wins MySQL Award

Yesterday eBay won an award at the O'Reilly MySQL conference. Congratulations to the Chris Kasten's team. Chris also did a presentation today at the MySQL conference. The caching layer his team created allows us to store "session" data on the server. This data can actually be persisted across sessions, depending on the use case, so it is really a little better than your typical HTTPSessions. Plus it actually scales :-)

The MySQL cache compliments HTTP cookies. We also use Flash for local storage as another alternative to the tiny world of HTTP cookies. Flash has a lot of advantages. The most obvious is the 100K default limit as opposed to the 4K limit of HTTP cookies. Flash "cookies" are not sent to the server, making them much more secure. One of the fun things I did recently was help setup guidelines on when an application should use plain 'ol HTTP cookies, Flash local storage, or the MySQL cache. I got to become much more familiar with the MySQL cache, and thus it wasn't suprising to me when I heard about it winning the award from MySQL.

eBay on developerWorks

I have written a lot of articles for IBM over the last couple of years. Most recently I got a chance to write about "my day job" if you will: eBay. I wrote two articles on how we use Eclipse at eBay to tackle a lot of interesting problems. When I first came up with the idea for the two articles, it seemed really cool but I was a little worried about it being complicated. When you think of a large company (and with 15,000 employees and a $36B market cap, eBay certainly qualifies) you think of all kinds of red tape, armies of lawyers, etc. I was pleasantly surprised to have almost none of that to deal with for these two articles. The articles definitely show some of what's "under the hood" at eBay, but its just enough to explain some of eBay's unique needs and how we have used Eclipse to help with these needs.

eBay Desktop

I generally don't blog about my employer too much. But eBay officially released a very cool piece of software today, eBay Desktop. This is the beta product formerly known as San Dimas. It is an Adobe AIR product allowing you to do pretty much all things eBay related from a snazzy desktop application. Read all about it on eBay evangelist Alan Lewis's blog.

#756

One of the great things about eBay is the endless opportunities for profit. It's like when the iPhone debuted. The only company (besides Apple) hoping for Apple stores to sell out quickly was eBay. Of course we would love to have #756 auctioned on our site. For that matter, how about #757 hit just last night? And don't forget #755. You get the picture.

Anyways, I was pretty surprised to see the Hank Aaron video message to Bonds after Barry hit #756. Everyone wants to be so righteous and hold Barry in contempt. At the same time, they realize that people everywhere were following the chase, so they wanted a piece of that action. Bud Selig may hate Barry, but how much coin has Barry put in his and the other owners' pockets?

I like having Barry Bonds as the top player of my generation. I like that we have a guy who was already the best in the sport, but who went out, broke the rules, used technology and took the game to levels it had never seen before. He did it and never apologized for being better than everybody else before him.

When Mark McGwire broke the single season record, I remember thinking "man if he suddenly stays healthy into his 40's, he could break Aaron's record." I am so glad that didn't happen. McGwire was always ashamed of his use of juice. He just wanted to fit in with the greats and be liked by the masses. He needed the juice to do that, but he also needed for people to not know about the juice at the same time. He was too weak to break the record, and too weak the represent my generation.

Barry is perfect. He doesn't care about people liking him. He doesn't want to fit in with the greats of the game, he wants to tower over them. He's egotistical, self-centered, and completely focussed on success at all costs. He's the modern day Ty Cobb.

Cross Site Scripting with Yahoo Local Search API

So I have a fun a little project where I was playing around with the Yahoo Local Search API. I really like Yahoo's local search. I think it is much better than Google's, though in all fairness that opinion was formed 18+ months ago. They have a great open API. Of course they place a limitation on how much you can use. What's interesting is that usage is tied to IP address. The limit is 5000 queries per day per IP address.

This of course begs for Cross Site Scripting(XSS.) If the call to their API to happen from a user's browser, then it counts against that individual user's 5000 query limit. One obvious way to accomplish is this is with Flex. That's because the Yahoo API server farm has an open policy for Flash.

Another way is via JavaScript. Of course I can't make an XMLHttpRequest directly from a user's browser to Yahoo because of browser security. Luckily Yahoo encourages Cross Site Script. You can make a request to their local search API with response output set to JSON and with a callback method. From there you just need some sneaky JavaScript:

 function search(lat,lng,cat){
  var reqUrl = "http://local.yahooapis.com/LocalSearchService"+
   "/V2/localSearch?appid=YahooDemo&"+
                        "output=json&callback=showResults";
  var req = reqUrl + "&query="+cat+"&latitude="
                           +lat+"&longitude="+lng;
  var rdiv = document.getElementById("resultlist");
  var jsonp = document.createElement("script");
  jsonp.setAttribute("type","text/javascript");
  jsonp.setAttribute("src",req);
  rdiv.appendChild(jsonp);  
 }

The sneaky part here is creating a "script" DOM element, setting its src attribute to the dynamic URL, and then dropping it into the main page DOM. It gets evaluated immediately. The URL response looks like:

showResults({"ResultSet":{"totalResultsAvailable":3423,"totalResultsReturned":10,"firstResultPosition"

:1,"ResultSetMapUrl":"http:\/\/local.yahoo.com\/mapview?stx=coffee&radius=50&ed=sh5iF6131DyGMtZvcmi9jNSxMpMwUjolfcSc44DLrkDbXpY-"

,"Result":[{"Title":"City Espresso Gourmet Coffee","Address":"630 Blossom Hill Rd","City":"San Jose"

,"State":"CA","Phone":"(408) 972-4500","Latitude":"37.250463","Longitude":"-121.8436","Rating":{"AverageRating"

:"","TotalRatings":"0","TotalReviews":"0"},"Distance":"1.18","Url":"http:\/\/local.yahoo.com\/details

?id=21609154&stx=coffee&csz=San+Jose+CA&ed=WbZ4Ba160SzTaXFlbDSmVAyxneC9N59mhMtS3xZb6kL86aeI4P1iTZT5BJOOXR5qK9HSoV5KX0wL"

,"ClickUrl":"http:\/\/local.yahoo.com\/details?id=21609154&stx=coffee&csz=San+Jose+CA&ed=WbZ4Ba160SzTaXFlbDSmVAyxneC9N59mhMtS3xZb6kL86aeI4P1iTZT5BJOOXR5qK9HSoV5KX0wL"

,"MapUrl":"http:\/\/maps.yahoo.com\/maps_result?name=City+Espresso+Gourmet+Coffee&desc=4089724500&csz

=San+Jose+CA&qty=9&cs=9&ed=WbZ4Ba160SzTaXFlbDSmVAyxneC9N59mhMtS3xZb6kL86aeI4P1iTZT5BJOOXR5qK9HSoV5KX0wL

&gid1=21609154","BusinessUrl":"","BusinessClickUrl":""}]}});

The function showResults gets evaluated with the results from Yahoo. How nice of Yahoo to support JSONP. The eBay APIs also have great support for this technique.

Scarcity

I walked by the San Jose Oakridge Apple Store today. They had up a sign indicating that they had no iPhones. So I guess those things really did sell out. Hey that's good for business.