None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise. Once you hit a certain threshold of traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that Rails does for you (RJS, ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, etc.) or move the slow parts of your application out of Rails, or both.
5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne
The absurdity of the situation, when put in the wider context, is breath-taking: with tens of millions dying of AIDS and hunger all around the world, the public opinion in the US focused on a single case of prolonging the run of a naked life, of a persistent vegetative state deprived of all specifically human characteristics. These are the two extremes we find ourselves today with regard to human rights: on the one hand those "missed by the bombs" (mentally and physically full human beings, but deprived of rights), on the other hand a human being reduced to bare vegetative life, but this bare life protected by the entire state apparatus.
Slavoj Zizek about "Children of Men"
If the old hierarchic societies oppressed vital forces through their rigid ideological systems and the state apparatuses that enforced them, today’s societies are losing their vitality through their very permissive hedonism: everything is allowed, but decaffeinated, deprived of its substance.
Slavoj Zizek about "Children of Men"
HTTP = UFBP (Universal Firewall Bypass Protocol)
The cyclomatic complexity of a section of source code is the count of the number of linearly independent paths through the source code.
Cyclomatic complexity
A low cyclomatic complexity contributes to a program's understandability and indicates it is amenable to modification at lower risk than a more complex program. A module's cyclomatic complexity is also a strong indicator of its testability.
Cyclomatic Complexity
Note that, like all interactions in this approach, it's not event-driven - it's state-driven. If you keep re-POSTing the same Invoice, or Item or Offer, it only gets created once, and the email only needs to be sent once!
The REST Dialogues: Business Functions
Oh, there is no spec. This is just what Microsoft seems to be doing. Looked like a good idea, so now all the cool kids are doing it.
The S stands for Simple
If you're unlucky, they'll ask you to derive the outline of their Ph.D. thesis on fault-tolerant massively parallel machine-learning systems. Or to solve a grand-unification style computation problem involving telephone switches, grid networks, and third-degree differential equations. Or, God forbid, they'll ask you about the darkest corners of C++ syntax.
The Truth About Interviewing
There was a mindset for a long time that to have proper model-view separation, you needed to have the HTML in a template file that was modified by the designer that was linked in various ways to the code. You had your objects, you had your HTML template, and then you had a binding file that described how they are related to each other. Different vendors did that in different ways, but Seaside throws that away too, and says, 'No, we are going to have programmatic HTML generation. Each component is just going to be given a canvas and is going to spit out its own HTML, using that API.
Heresy and turtles (all the way down) with Avi Bryant
Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market — especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people — is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The "regulation-enforcement-more regulation" strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom.
Introducing the Baen Free Library
...this has always been my fear for Rails; that in five to ten years, the worst jobs you could get will be Rails jobs where you're maintaining stuff built by non-programmers who figured Rails made programming so easy that they didn't really need to understand what they were doing.
A Conversation With Reg Braithwaite
He had located the data he was working on near the top of memory -- the largest locations the instructions could address -- so, after the last datum was handled, incrementing the instruction address would make it overflow. The carry would add one to the operation code, changing it to the next one in the instruction set: a jump instruction. Sure enough, the next program instruction was in address location zero, and the program went happily on its way.
The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer
Antypolska i antynarodowa żydopropaganda
# ICQ - ("I seek you") ufundowana w Tel Avivivie, Israel
# Wikipedia - ufundowana w Izraelu
# "Walt Disney Co." - Po smierci Walta Disnaya firma wykupiona w 1984 przez Michaela Eisnera (żyda); firma calkowicie zmienila profil produkcji.
Polonica.net
This represents a clear pattern. AOL received more pushback than they expected, and would sort of let things stand for a while. Then they would threaten a different Gaim developer. Each time a new Gaim developer was threatened, we had to look at new legal support, to prevent a conflict of interest.
Gaim changes name to Pidgin
The team of developers and designers at 37 signals are extremely talented in what they do. They are beginning to love their message a little more than their users. Simplicity is great but not at the cost of value. Stop telling the world what they want and respond to what they need.
37signals: Our way or the highway
I'd like to predict that the current stacks of software by 10-15 years are going to be in a much worse legacy and more of a nightmare to maintain. You're going to have employment forever maintaining this stuff. C++, Java code, C# code, this stuff is very complicated and very brittle with all these class libraries and frameworks. We're digging ourselves in a really big hole and there will be a lifetime of opportunities for you people to maintain this stuff that you're creating.
Dave Thomas, "Who will Develop Software in 10 Years?"
How unusual is it for singleton classes to come into play? It happens far more frequently than we think about them, because all class methods are actually singleton methods of instances of Class.
A Ruby Metaprogramming Introduction
