ReadWriteWeb

"If Engineering at Etsy has a religion, it's the Church of Graphs," Ian Malpass writes on the Etsy Code as Craft blog. And how is Etsy fulfilling its religious obligations? With a Node.js daemon called StatsD, which the company has made available on GitHub. StatsD listens for messages on a UDP port, conducts its counting or timing, and then sends the info off to graphite for graphing.

It's based on a Perl daemon of the same name created by Cal Henderson for Flickr.

For many of us, our tributaries of social data find their way into our lifestream, an aggregated collection of our online activities. More often than not, that stream appears as a collection of text entries: the most recent item followed by the second most recent, and so on. While the progression is obvious, what's not so clear is the passage of time. Those data points could be seconds apart - or months apart. Enter Dipity, a service that takes those moments in time and plots them along along a timeline, providing an entirely new take on the activities we're pursuing and how they relate.