The premise seemed simple enough: create a web view to the product data that was largely CRUD operations. When we arrived the team was already on it’s third revision of the web application and it was in pretty bad shape. It was nothing we couldn’t handle or so we thought.
My first experience with the app itself was the first red flag. The screen flickered erratically on page load and the layout appeared to vomit itself onto the screen. When I asked what the product was written the answer I received was: Javascript. I shrugged that off and asked what the server side backend was written in only to find that it didn’t exist.
uncov — Oh dear!
Be Careful Not To Use Any Patented Tax Shelters This Tax Season
one patent holder who insists that of course tax strategies should be patentable since he had to “think outside the box” to come up with it. His attorney also comes up with some totally unsupported statement that somehow this “levels the playing field.” What’s not explained is why any of this is patentable. If the tax deductions are allowed by the law, then it seems pretty ridiculous to think that it can be limited by a monopoly right.
Techdirt — ?!?
Locus Magazine's Recommended Reading: 2006
This recommended reading list, published in Locus Magazine’s February 2007 issue, is a consensus by Locus editors and reviewers
Science fiction if you are unfamiliar with Locus.
Twitter, Rails, Seaside, Respect
If you’re obsessive about dynamic languages and Web frameworks (and who isn’t?) it’s been a juicy few days. Let’s start with a bunch of pointers: Mike Pence interviews Avi Bryant & tries to start a fight. Avi says “huh?”. DHH too, in his own space and an InfoQ interview. At the same time, a Twitter developer disses Rails. DHH says smart things and so do Kellan of LaughingMeme and Ryan Tomayko. Phew. Now it’s my turn.
Tim Bray, ongoing
Rails and Scaling with Multiple Databases
Talking about this on the level of having “multi-database connectivity” come out of the box in Rails is simplifying the problem to an unreasonable level, I think. Would the multi-database connectivity features meet my needs or Twitter’s? They are different problems with minor overlap and we’re talking about the minor overlapping piece like it’s the biggest part of the problem.
Most of the time spent getting our setup running was in the conceptual and data wrangling phases. The amount of time it took to implement the multi-database connectivity was negligible compared to the amount of time it took to devise a method of splitting things out at the data level. When all was said and done, the Ruby/Rails related bits were implemented in no more than 40-50 lines of code.
Ryan Tomayko
But as Media Matters for America has extensively documented, bigotry and hate speech targeting, among other characteristics, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and ethnicity continue to permeate the airwaves through personalities such as Glenn Beck, Neal Boortz, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, Michael Smerconish, and John Gibson.
Media Matters — Impressive when you see it all in once place.
We’ve been extremely happy with Rails, and make use of the multitude of helpers that it offers us - like any application on any stack, though, providing fast response times to a (rapidly) growing number of users is a challenge. The solutions are often tightly coupled to the application and its characteristics, and while scaling the most trafficked Rails site in the world, we’ve run into situations where existing solutions weren’t enough.
This process has led us to build a number of tools that help us deal with our load, and just as soon as we find some spare time, we’ll be releasing many of them. In the meantime, you can find out first what sorts of challenges we’ve encountered and solutions we’ve come up with at my talk at the SDForum Silicon Valley Ruby Conference next weekend (April 21-22nd).
Blaine Cook, Liminal Existence — I’ll be watching for what Blaine publishes on this. If you haven’t noticed, the Twitter developers have been quite rational about this whole episode. Can’t say the same for some other commentators.
