Top all-time · #7241
Colin Steele
Personal blog · colinsteele.orgprogrammingstartups
Colin Steele's personal blog at colinsteele.org covers programming and startups. Since 2010, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 30 times, most often “Against the grain: building a startup with Clojure and AWS (2012)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-10, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Colin Steele's post on RoomKey's hotel search architecture, which embeds Solr and a hotel inventory database in the software, and cite it as an example of that design.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Personal blog and photos
Most-linked posts?
- Against the grain: building a startup with Clojure and AWS (2012)6 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2012-05-15
- 60k% Growth with Clojure (2012)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-05-27
- 60,000% growth in 7 months using Clojure and AWS2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-07-24
What Hacker News says?
This [0] is probably not at all your use-case but it sprung to mind in any case. A fun read for sure [0] https://www.colinsteele.org/post/27929539434/60000-growth-in...
Comment linking /post/27929539434/60000-growth-in-7-months-using-clojure-and-aws
on “Ask HN: Has anybody shipped a web app at scale with 1 DB per account?”Submitted Home at Last, or, The Last Programming Language I Will Ever Learn as a story · 71 points
HN discussionThe article does not mention the potential impact of Roomkey: http://www.roomkey.com/ Based on the articles that the CTO of Roomkey has written, I am under the impression that their technology is very cutting edge: http://www.colinsteele.org/post/27929539434/60-000-growth-in... http://www.colinsteele.org/post/23103789647/against-the-grai... It is important to note that the big hotel chains had realized that they had…
Comment linking /post/23103789647/against-the-grain-aws-clojure-startup
on “How Hotel Reservations Work ”Submitted Against the grain: building a startup with Clojure and AWS (2012) as a story · 21 points
HN discussionI feel like the writer of the above article answers part of your question when they write: "My experience is that when you tackle big problems, that go beyond simple execution but require actual strong engineers, hiring will be a problem, there's just no way around it. Choosing people that fit your development culture and see themselves fit to tackle big problems is a long process, integrating them is also time cons…
Comment linking /post/23103789647/against-the-grain-aws-clojure-startup
on “Another year of Clojure”Submitted How We Built the Next Gen Travel Agency using Amazon, Clojure, and a Small Team as a story · 14 points
HN discussionFor incredible scale, and heretic ideas, I think people should consider the decisions that Colin Steele made as CTO of RoomKey. He was thinking about how to build a database that could offer nearly real time searching and yet handle any level of traffic. The idea he hit upon was compiling his code with a static snapshot of his database. Think about this carefully: instead of lots of webservers putting strain on a ce…
Comment linking /post/27929539434/60-000-growth-in-7-months-using-clojure-and-aws
on “Rethinking caching in web apps”Submitted 60,000% growth in 7 months using Clojure and AWS as a story · 13 points
HN discussionA step forward was made by RoomKey. You should read what their CTO wrote. At RoomKey, they made several radical decisions that gave them a very unusual architecture: -------------- Decision One: I put relational data on one side and “static", non-relational data on the other, with a big wall of verification process between them. This led to Decision Two. Because the data set is small, we can “bake in" the entire con…
Comment linking /post/27929539434/60-000-growth-in-7-months-using-clojure-and-aws
on “Docker, Containers, and the Future of Application Delivery”Submitted 60,000% growth in 7 months using Clojure and AWS as a story · 5 points
HN discussionHotelicopter also runs on Clojure. And I would recommend Colin Steele's description of his decisions as CTO, as he took the codebase away from PHP, first to Ruby and then to Clojure. The bit about the failures of Ruby are (in my opinion) the most interesting. Basically, it was too much work to get Ruby to go fast enough, and their problems were solved by using Agents in Clojure. This I think is the key bit of the st…
Comment linking /post/23103789647/against-the-grain-aws-clojure-startup
on “Clojure-powered Startups”Submitted How We Built an Online Travel Agency Using Amazon, Clojure, and a Small Team as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI feel like the "Why Use Clojure?" essay is a bit flawed. I feel like it focuses too much on details so minor that I would regard them as trivial. I would suggest that a much better answer to the question "Why use Clojure?" could be found by reading Colin Steele's essays. When he became CTO at Hotelicopter/RoomKey he was inheriting a vast system of PHP and Ruby. When they re-wrote the system in Clojure, he had a ver…
Comment linking /post/23103789647/against-the-grain-aws-clojure-startup
on “Why use Clojure?”Submitted Building the Next-Gen Travel Agency Using AWS, Clojure and a Comically Small Team as a story · 3 points
HN discussion" these multi-company collaborations (Taligent, Itanium, even Power) rarely come to much. " That is a good point. A good example that's happening right now is https://www.roomkey.com/ If you read this you will be amazed by the technology that RoomKey developed: "Against the Grain: How We Built the Next Generation Online Travel Agency using Amazon, Clojure, and a Comically Small Team" http://www.colinsteele.org/post/…
Comment linking /post/23103789647/against-the-grain-aws-clojure-startup
on “'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)”Submitted Building the Next Generation Online Travel Agency using Amazon, Clojure as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHere's a few: - Walmart Labs - http://jobs.walmart.com/san-bruno/ecommerce/mobile-instore-s... - Staples - http://careers.staples.com/sanmateo/ - Climate Corp (now owned by Monsanto) - https://github.com/TheClimateCorporation - RoomKey http://www.colinsteele.org/post/27929539434/60-000-growth-in... - Puppet Labs - http://puppetlabs.com/blog/new-era-application-services-pupp... - Soundcloud - http://blog.josephwilk.n…
Comment linking /post/27929539434/60-000-growth-in-7-months-using-clojure-and-aws
on “Ask HN: Who's using Clojure in production?”Submitted Sequoia's Mission Accomplished as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFor those who are interested, here is some background reading on Roomkey: 60,000% growth in 7 months using Clojure and AWS http://www.colinsteele.org/post/27929539434/60000-growth-in-... Against the Grain: How We Built the Next Generation Online Travel Agency using Amazon, Clojure, and a Comically Small Team http://www.colinsteele.org/post/23103789647/against-the-grai...
Comment linking /post/23103789647/against-the-grain-aws-clojure-startup
on “Too many open files: Tracking down a bug in production”Submitted The Island of Misfit Startups: Part II (KesslerGym) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion+1 for Solr - looking at the search on domcop.com, it seems like a perfect fit for the faceting stuff. There might be some messiness with the regex search (looking for user-defined patterns of consonants, vowels, etc) as I've never needed to set that up, but the rest would be really clean. See also this blog post that discusses how RoomKey uses read-only Solr instances that are repopulated daily to speed up searchin…
Comment linking /post/23103789647/against-the-grain-aws-clojure-startup
on “How MySQL memory table saved the day”Submitted Island of Misfit Startups: Part I (LensReader) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis is my favorite take on this idea: https://www.colinsteele.org/post/27929539434/60000-growth-in... Quoting: "Because the data set is small, we can “bake in” the entire content database into a version of our software. Yep, you read that right. We build our software with an embedded instance of Solr and we take the normalized, cleansed, non-relational database of hotel inventory, and jam that in as well, when we p…
Comment linking /post/27929539434/60000-growth-in-7-months-using-clojure-and-aws
on “Why Not to Build a Time-Series Database (2018)”Submitted Axioms of Polity as a story · 1 points
HN discussionMany of us become cynical about technologies that promise big breakthroughs in productivity, so we become overly careful in our choices, but this is a good question for managers to always be asking: "Why would a large organisation with a mix of technologies and legacy systems want to muddy the waters with a completely new language?" If you want to make the conservative choice, and stick with what you already have, y…
Comment linking /post/23103789647/against-the-grain-aws-clojure-startup
on “Two months early. 300k under budget”Submitted 60k% Growth with Clojure (2012) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted One Rubyist converts to Clojure as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
