The secret to perfectly calculate Rails database connection pool size

Ben Sheldon argues that the maximum number of connections in your rails DB pool should be… set to infinite! That should not be the limiting factor. If you have too many, than we should limit threads or something else. Interesting.

The magic of software

Part of the author’s point is that there is a feedback loop in what we can build with software: Discovering what is possible, informs what we can build, and building things allows us to discover what is possible.

Since we understand everything about the computer and don’t need to discover its workings, software seems much more straightforward. With nothing to discover, we might say that software is the engineering practice of combining and assembling what is available from the complex system of computing in order to manifest a given vision.

But we don’t understand everything about the computer. Yes, humans designed computers, but that doesn’t mean that we understand their behavior completely, and less so when we start thinking about how different software algorithms react to each other (network traffic for example). Then we have emergent behavior.

The Deathbed Fallacy

This is a bit different, because it’s not related to software, what I usually post about.

Someone on their “deathbed” doesn’t necessarily have a perfect perspective about their past selves. And in any case, even if it did, folks on their deathbed might have 20/20 hindsight about their own preferences. That is not necessarily good advise for others. Some of that has to do that a 20 year old today is living in a world 50 years different than his grandpa: Does he really have useful advise?