A presentation by Scott Raymond about PackRat, scaling with AWS and the big rewrite. 60 minutes of wisdom and experience.

• Using the cloud: the pros and cons of running a popular app on EC2, S3, SQS, and SimpleDB.
• MySQL pitfalls: how scaling the database tier nearly killed us, and how we survived.
• Caching strategies: memcached vs. memoization, and the best of both worlds.
• Interacting with Facebook: third-party libraries vs. rolling your own.
• Dealing with cheaters: detecting and thwarting duplicate accounts, bots, and GreaseMonkey hacks.
• Why we re-wrote the application from scratch, and switched from Rails to Merb in the process.