What is Danga?
Danga Interactive was Brad Fitzpatrick's company that developed LiveJournal and by necessity the backend software to drive it all. Since Danga's acqusition by Six Apart, the meaning of "Danga" is somewhat undefined. It mostly represents this website and this software. A lot of the contributors to this software, both old and new, work for SixApart, but just as many are from the larger community.... people like you.
What's the relation to code.sixapart.com?
There's a lot of overlap. Danga was the original home for most this stuff, pre-SixApart, and we don't like breaking links. code.sixapart.com hosts the Danga project's subversion repositories, and has other projects open sourced by Six Apart.
Why'd you write all this stuff? NIH?
As much as it might look like Not-Invented-Here syndrome, we only wrote software when we had to:
- memcached: nothing similar existed
- MogileFS: storage vendors were screwing us, and no cheap (open source) spray-files-everywhere solution existed
- Perlbal: needed internal redirects, tried to hack it onto 4 others load balancers, but too painful. Easier to write our own, then once we had it we were able to start doing tons more tricks and had a lot more visibility into what was going on. Also our performance went up a ton, as Perlbal's load balancing is just better than anything else we tried. (and we went through a ton of load balancers)
- Gearman: nothing existing. or maybe they did, but we couldn't cut through marketing hype about XML grids, etc. And we didn't need XML bloat for internal function calls.
- djabberd: Other jabber servers weren't pluggable enough. They'd give us hooks for auth at the most, but never custom rosters, custom avatar/vcard hooks, etc. Also most of them didn't scale well at all.
- ...
We hate reinventing the wheel. But when the wheel doesn't exist, or is square, we're not afraid to invent a round one.
