Here at Yelp, we’re passionate about building things; it’s at the core of our engineering philosophy. In fact, we enjoy it so much that many of us keep on building after we finish work. I recently found some spare time to work on an interesting project with the Microsoft Kinect. I think it’s a cool start and I’ve open sourced the code so that others can build something even cooler. Easy Skeletal Tracking If you’re reading this blog, you’re likely familiar with the Microsoft Kinect. It combines an RGB camera, an infrared laser projector, and an infrared camera to determine...

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At Yelp, we store nearly all of our data in MySQL. At any given time we’re issuing tens of thousands of SQL queries to our database cluster per second, with some individual servers going above the 10k qps mark. Our database cluster consists of billions of rows. In response to a lot of different problems we’ve had to optimize the snot out of our MySQL installation, and we’ve learned some interesting things along the way. A colleague and I recently gave a presentation to some of our coworkers, titled  MySQL Minutiae & InnoDB Internals. The talk covered some good background knowledge that every developer should...

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