I have been using Resque quite a bit recently. It is a really nice asynchronous job system based on Redis. Resque checks the queues for jobs to process in a fixed order. (In alphabetic order, to be precise.) This turns out to be a problem is you want predictable handling time for jobs. For example, [...]
I am a fan of polylithic architectures. Such architectures have many advantages related to enhancing evolvability and maintainability. When you decide to create a system composed of small pieces how do you decide what functionality goes into which component? Principles The goal is to sub-divide the application into multiple highly cohesive components which are weakly [...]
A friend of mine recently described why he feels ruby is immature. I, of course, disagree with him. There is much in ruby that could be improved, but the issues he raised are a) intentional design choices or b) weaknesses in specific applications built in ruby. Neither of those scenarios can be fairly described as [...]
Once you start using opensource at your day job you are going to want to improve it. Many improvements are going to be generally useful and should be contributed back to the community. A few of these changes may be quite specific and of no value to the community at large. Changes that are generally [...]
Mysql::Error: Specified key was too long; max key length is 767 bytes: CREATE UNIQUE INDEX … Seriously!? ‘Cause no one would ever want a unique constraint on medium sized varchar column.
it only shaved a second off the response time so i reverted it It is not often that a full one second improvement to the response time of an HTTP request so insignificant that it is not worth committing.
When designing hypertext formats is it better to provide links for every available action or to provided links to related resources and let the client use the protocol interface to achieve particular actions on those related resources? I have leaned in both directions at various times. I have never fully convinced myself either. To make [...]
Mr Amundsen’s recent post regarding the design of “semantic machine media types” got me thinking about media type design. One of the commonly encouraged practices, particularly on the REST discuss group, is the use of link elements. I really dislike this idea. It sets my teeth on edge because it treats links – which are [...]
It seems that more and more are beginning to grasp the hypermedia constraint of REST. This is an unmitigated Good Thing. However, once you get hypermedia the idea of a client persisting links that it has found starts to seem a little odd. For example, Kirk Wylie describes clients that store links as “not well [...]
The idea of creating a functioning application by loosely connecting many small pieces has been around for a long time. Certainly since early in the development of Unix, and probably even before. It has survived because it is such a powerful approach. This idea is at the very core of the architecture of the web. [...]
