March 2012
1 post
February 2012
2 posts
Some Thoughts on "NoOps"
After the neologism “NoOps” made its way around the web to much ridicule this week, Lucas at AppFog took a stab at reclaiming the term following its rejection by developers and operations teams alike. I originally posted this as a comment on a link aggregator, but the original post has been deleted so I’ve moved it here to give it a home. The original comment follows:
It is...
January 2012
12 posts
Designing Stateful Distributed Applications
I don’t often make it to conferences, but occasionally submit a talk or two on ideas that have guided (and emerged from) my thought, research, and work over the past year. Here’s the second for 2012:
Faced with unprecedented growth and equally demanding calls for reliability and predictability, we as engineers find ourselves called to develop stable distributed applications with solid scalability...
“It was a subtle change, but a profound one nonetheless. The fundamental units of...”
– Steven Johnson in Interface Culture (Harper SF, 1997 - p. 144)
“The importance of this habit of mine for our purposes lies in the simple...”
– Allucquere Rosanne Stone in The War of Desire and Technology at the close of the Mechanical Age (MIT Press, 2001 - p. 167)
Searching for Truth in Distributed Applications...
I don’t often make it to conferences, but occasionally submit a talk or two on ideas that have guided (and emerged from) my thought, research, and work over the past year. Here’s the first for 2012:
As patterns in webops infrastructure evolve into increasingly interdependent networks of distributed applications, the process of illuminating and responding to failures and abnormalities...
December 2011
4 posts
October 2011
1 post
September 2011
9 posts
“Every system is embedded in multiple networks that provide streams of data that...”
– Mark C. Taylor, After God
“Though structuralism and poststructuralism provide valuable insights, they...”
– Mark C. Taylor, After God
You Have to Break It
Over time, many applications begin to accrue seemingly-dead cruft and detritus that people are afraid to touch for fear of breaking the program. I’d suggest that this cruft is among the most insidious forms of technical debt in that it’s held in place by a lack of understanding and fear to modify the program, rooted in superstition rather than reason. You may break the program in the process, but...
Software Patents
The USPTO currently has an open request-for-comment period on the future of software patents surrounding the recent Bilski decision. I spent a few minutes tapping out a quick letter supporting the cessation and revocation of software patents. You’re welcome to read it if you like. If you agree, I’d encourage you to send something similar yourself.
...
July 2010
1 post
Strong Feelings
While growing up, I lived in a rather small, conservative, rural community. Like many in my hometown, I subscribed to a set of views which were quite exclusive. I was encouraged to attend conferences and retreats at which leaders spoke at length upon the importance of gently teaching (rather, convincing) others of the errors of their ways with great fervor. Upon leaving my hometown for...
February 2010
1 post
Hello Miso!
Miso was created by a couple Ruby developers for a project that, due to a client requirements, had to be completed in Java. After a couple hours of searching, we were unable to find a lightweight web framework with the simplicity of Sinatra or Merb. The most popular alternatives seemed laden with complex configurations, IDE dependencies / complex build processes, and required mountains of code to...
August 2009
1 post
Introducing Tokyo Cabinet + TDB for Datamapper in...
Over the past few weekends, I’ve been working to create a Datamapper adapter for Tokyo Cabinet’s TDB (table-like) datastore for use with Ruby scripts and applications.
Many have suggested that “if you need/want an ORM, non-relational databases aren’t for you.” I’d like to suggest that this isn’t necessarily the case.
Get the code right now
Like MySQL, Tokyo Cabinet has several different...
July 2009
2 posts
Haystack Released for @engineyard
Come and get it!
Haystack is my C++-based entry in Engine Yard’s cryptography contest. Download it here and give it a try. I’ve provided compiled Mac binaries for Intel’s Core 2 Duo and Dual Core Xeon processors (MacBook Pro/iMac/Mini and XServe, respectively).
[ DOWNLOAD NOW ]
Source is included, or see it at GitHub. Screenshot below.
Good luck!
June 2009
6 posts
nightly remote backup for mysql databases
If you’re not making daily backups of your databases, you’re either not doing anything important or living dangerously.
Here’s a little Ruby script I wrote to remotely back up a MySQL database each night.
This script is designed to log into your server via SSH, back up a database of your choice using mysqldump, compress it using tar+gzip, and download the result before cleaning...
1 tag
code blog
About a month ago, Jeff Atwood wrote a post describing the Internet as a “bathroom wall” for code. It was an odd analogy, but it hit home - often when Googling for a quick solution to a common problem in a particular language, one will find a pile of half-assed and/or suboptimal answers that have a high PageRank, drop them in, and quickly discover that they’ve given their app...
a regex for stripping basic textile markup
You can imagine how much fun I had writing this. Maybe you’ll find it useful.
things i promised to do but never did at sxsw
Day 1: I will pretend never to have heard of Twitter, fail to understand.
Day 2: I will refuse to talk to anyone who does not call themselves a rockstar, ninja, superstar, sniper, or code poet.
Day 3: I will defend the IE 5.5 UI to my death and laud its rendering engine with praise due to outstanding ActiveX integration and support for Java.
Day 4: My first words in every conversation will be,...
“For chance to have a chance, for time to be more than an illusion, and for...”
– Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity (p. 93)
1 tag
a series of experiments
Often when I’m feeling frustrated or burnt out when working on a project, I’ll take a break to experiment with a new technology, language, or framework.
After all, the cure for too work is…more? Maybe I’m doing this wrong.
But playing with new ideas and platforms is a great way to break out of a funk. After finding myself burnt out working on a side project, I started...