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Every year, this seems like great brand promotion for Backblaze, to technical prospective customers, and a nice service to the field. What are some other examp

by neilv 2y ago

Every year, this seems like great brand promotion for Backblaze, to technical prospective customers, and a nice service to the field. What are some other examples from other companies of this, besides open source code?

ajross 2y ago
Benson Leung's USB cable crusade comes to mind. Also Jim Gettys' coming out of seeming retirement to educate us all about Bufferbloat.
bityard 2y ago
This is called "content marketing" and there are usually at least a handful of them on the HN front page at any given time. Although I will say that the BackBlaze drive stats articles are a much higher effort and standard of quality than you typically see for this tactic.
- CTDOCodebases 2y ago
  It's worth noting that this type of marketing can also improves page rankings.
devrand 2y ago
Puget Systems has similar publications covering their experience building client systems, though not always in the same level of detail. They also have PugetBench to benchmark systems in real-world applications/workflows.
samch 2y ago
A company called TechEmpower used to run periodic web framework benchmarks and share out the results using nice dashboard. Not sure why they stopped doing these. https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&section=data-r22 https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&s... Edit: Adding a shoutout to the iFixIt teardowns that are also quite informative content: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown Edit 2: Also Lumafield CT scans: https://www.scanofthemonth.com/ https://www.scanofthemonth.com/
- KomoD 2y ago
  TechEmpower still does them. https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/issues/9589 https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/issues/95...
nerdponx 2y ago
Jepsen (of database benchmark fame) does paid consulting work.
zX41ZdbW 2y ago
Some examples from me: Database benchmarks: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench (containing 30+ databases) and the new JSON analytics benchmark, https://github.com/ClickHouse/JSONBench/ https://github.com/ClickHouse/JSONBench/ Plus, the hardware benchmark: https://benchmark.clickhouse.com/hardware/ https://benchmark.clickhouse.com/hardware/ (also used by Phoronix).
DecentShoes 2y ago
...Spotify wrapped kinda?
atYevP 2y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> When we started this, we did so with the intent of sharing data and hoping that others would do the same. We see glimmers of that here and there but it's still so fun for us to do and we're expanding on it with Networking Stats and some additional content that's going to be coming soon including how these inform our infrastructure deployment. Fun stuff :)

by neilv 2y ago

ajross 2y ago

Benson Leung's USB cable crusade comes to mind. Also Jim Gettys' coming out of seeming retirement to educate us all about Bufferbloat.

bityard 2y ago

This is called "content marketing" and there are usually at least a handful of them on the HN front page at any given time. Although I will say that the BackBlaze drive stats articles are a much higher effort and standard of quality than you typically see for this tactic.

CTDOCodebases 2y ago
It's worth noting that this type of marketing can also improves page rankings.

devrand 2y ago

Puget Systems has similar publications covering their experience building client systems, though not always in the same level of detail. They also have PugetBench to benchmark systems in real-world applications/workflows.

samch 2y ago

A company called TechEmpower used to run periodic web framework benchmarks and share out the results using nice dashboard. Not sure why they stopped doing these. https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&section=data-r22 https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&s... Edit: Adding a shoutout to the iFixIt teardowns that are also quite informative content: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown Edit 2: Also Lumafield CT scans: https://www.scanofthemonth.com/ https://www.scanofthemonth.com/

KomoD 2y ago
TechEmpower still does them. https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/issues/9589 https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/issues/95...

nerdponx 2y ago

Jepsen (of database benchmark fame) does paid consulting work.

zX41ZdbW 2y ago

Some examples from me: Database benchmarks: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench (containing 30+ databases) and the new JSON analytics benchmark, https://github.com/ClickHouse/JSONBench/ https://github.com/ClickHouse/JSONBench/ Plus, the hardware benchmark: https://benchmark.clickhouse.com/hardware/ https://benchmark.clickhouse.com/hardware/ (also used by Phoronix).

DecentShoes 2y ago

...Spotify wrapped kinda?

atYevP 2y ago

Yev from Backblaze here -> When we started this, we did so with the intent of sharing data and hoping that others would do the same. We see glimmers of that here and there but it's still so fun for us to do and we're expanding on it with Networking Stats and some additional content that's going to be coming soon including how these inform our infrastructure deployment. Fun stuff :)