Flickr Developer Site

Flickr launched a developer site recently (code.flickr). Dev sites intrigue me, especially those belonging to well-known companies. And for some reason, statements like this always seem to draw me in:

In the last week we deployed new code to Flickr 50 times, including 546 changes by 16 people. We issued over 2,000 new API keys, and third party developers made an average of 704 API calls per second, across 109 public API methods. We added 1 new API method, and updated 7 others. There are approximately 10,000 lines of open source code in our public subversion repository.

Sheesh, 704 API calls per second!? To interface with an API requires a slight bit of knowledge (and actual skill to do properly); I mean, it’s not something cousin Elroy could just “throw together” real quick. So to think there are that many people making that many requests per second is kind of crazy.

You can find running totals for those types of stats at the bottom of the main code.flickr page. Pretty cool.