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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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

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&s...

Edit: Adding a shoutout to the iFixIt teardowns that are also quite informative content:

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown

Edit 2: Also Lumafield CT scans:

https://www.scanofthemonth.com/

TechEmpower still does them. https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/issues/95...

Some examples from me:

Database benchmarks: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench (containing 30+ databases) and the new JSON analytics benchmark, https://github.com/ClickHouse/JSONBench/

Plus, the hardware benchmark: https://benchmark.clickhouse.com/hardware/ (also used by Phoronix).

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 :)

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

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

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.

...Spotify wrapped kinda?

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