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Anamnesis

of a kooky software developer with megalomaniacal inferiority complex

aws

MTurk Quality Experiment #1

11.08.2011 by Sergey Vasilyev 3 Comments

As I’ve previously mentioned in my Twitter (nolar), I’ve been experimenting with Amazon MTurk, and here are the preliminary results of the quality of the results for one specific task of translation of the texts from English to Russian.

Initially I wanted to name this article as “Zoo of Mechanical Turkeys”, but changed my mind for better SEO of this article (I mean relevancy, not the traffic and popularity of the Dark SEO). I don’t know why MTurk is so associated with turkeys in my mind, when it has nothing to do with these birds or nationality.

I guess, the results will show why it happens so. But before I will give you the results, I want to describe what the task is, and why is it so unusual.

[Read more…]

Posted in: Development Tagged: amazon, api, artificial intelligence, aws, boto, experiment, hit, human intelligence task, intelligence, mturk, python, quality, statistics

Perfect Employer

08.06.2011 by Sergey Vasilyev Leave a Comment

So, I’ve finally decided on what my ideal employer is. It is good when you do anything you want to do and is being paid, for sure. But this exact universe does not work this way. Though you still can get some goods from it.

1. Interesting challenging project. It should have real problems to solve, not just “find and embed, download and install” kind of tasks. This is easy enough, since almost any modern web application is an invention.

2. Scalable highly loaded system. Amazon Web Services (AWS) are good, other clouds are even better. If there is no scalability in mind (for now or for later), it is not interesting technically. I am not Web Site Developer, I consider myself as Web Application Developer, and I want to change this title to Scalable Web Application Developer with time. This is one of my mid-term goals.

3. Professional qualified team. I do not want to be the only smart guy. I want to learn from others, those who are much better than me. I want to see how they think, want to adopt their experience. Also, I prefer not to do all the parts of the work; some are better done by specific professionals, such as UI/UX, or front-end JavaScript coding, or graphical web design. And I am mostly senior server-side developer, or junior scalable architect.

4. Community contribution. I want to make my own professional background while solving employer’s business tasks. These goals do not conflict with each other, but for some reason everything written within the companies I worked for was treated as “know-how”, “intellectual property”, “not disclosure agreement” related, etc.

5. Have something to publish: magazines, conferences, blogs — any kind of knowledge sharing with references to employer’s business field. I will never use this possibility with 99% probability, but if I’ll wish to, I’d like to be allowed to. And, of course, there should be something to be proud of: innovative, modern.

I wonder if I’ll ever find such an employer. Moscow, United States, Canada – wherever. I was not that lucky yet, though close to it. But I still hope I will find it sooner or later.

Posted in: Job Tagged: aws, development, employer, happyness, highload, job, scalability, work

Amazon compact AMI with Ubuntu

29.05.2011 by Sergey Vasilyev 10 Comments

Did you ever try Amazon Web Services (AWS)? If you are an IT person and did not try it yet, then I recommend you to do so as soon as possible.  Just sign up with your Amazon account, and get their Free Tier for 1 year. Free Tier includes 10GB of EBS storage and 750 hours (24 hours * 31 days) of free time for “micro” instance. When the year will finish, this “micro” instance will cost you no more than ~$15/month (30 days * 24 hours * $0,02/hr).

You can easily run an instance of almost any modern OS — either Windows or any distribution of Linux — in less than a minute, with absolutely no need to go through difficult installation and initial configuration process. Just select an image (Amazon Machine Image, AMI), push the button, wait few seconds and connect with ssh to a running virtual server.

To be honest, the initial motive of making my own nano-AMI has came from misunderstanding of the Free Tier policy. I had found that the smallest of these images are 8GB in size, and one image takes all the Free Tier included EBS storage. So I thought that instead of  running one big 8GB empty image I can run ten nano-size 1GB images instead. Thus, saving money by fitting into Free Tier boundaries.

[Read more…]

Posted in: Development Tagged: amazon, ami, aws, cloud, ebs, ec2, image, instance, natty, server, ubuntu

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