Cull.tv Makes Noise with Node.js
September 23, 2011 - by jacksonwest
Cull.tv is "rebooting music videos for the 21st century" according to Co-Founder Katherine de León -- though for those of us old enough to remember MTV back when all the network did was play music videos, the site is a refreshing throwback to the days when you could "turn it on, leave it on." While NewTeeVee points out that the startup isn't alone in trying to re-engineer the music video experience, it is unique in that the site is built with Node.js.
John Hurliman, Cull's CTO, wrote a blog post describing the basics of putting the site together, and shares how Node.js shined even in a surprising place:
[O]ne area where we are treading new ground with node.js+JavaScript is with our real-time recommender. The common wisdom is to use node in computing-light, I/O-heavy workloads. Machine learning and recommendations are often thought of as very compute-heavy, CPU-bound tasks. In reality, when your working set grows large enough and you go beyond simple collaborative filtering to making content-based decisions (requiring access to more and more data) and applying several layers of rulesets as most production ready recommenders do, you are I/O-bound again and worrying more about building a massive data pipeline than shaving off the last 10% of clock cycles.If you're looking for an example of a well-designed, well-implemented web application built entirely using Node.js, check it out. Of course, it's also great if you're just looking to check out some cool new music!