By now you’ve all heard about BuyLater, my happy little firefox extension that (thanks to an unexpected LifeHacker.com article) is rapidly climbing towards 1000 users and world domination. Without getting TOO technical, I thought I would share with you how I saved BuyLater from becoming an infrastructure nightmare – one that would have either killed the value of the application (real-time updates), or sucked tons of money and hardware into a technology backwash.

This will be a little controversial, I think – simply because the technique I used, (grid computing), is most often used for less… legitimate… purposes. So much so, that it is almost synonymous with “Bot Nets”.

But let’s go back to the beginning.

Read the rest of this entry »