Is Ruby Too Slow For Web-Scale?

Nate Berkopec writes a long post about Ruby performance and how it affects web applications. Not-withstanding the click-bait title, Nate brings up that raw performance might not be as significant as many teams would like to think. Many of use work on applications that receive only a modest amount of traffic. In this organizations, the trade-off between engineering productivity and server costs tilts towards productivity.

Five ways to paginate in Postgres, from the basic to the exotic

Most web-applications encounter a need to paginate results into multiple page loads. Joe Nelson works his way from the most simple implementations (LIMIT and OFFSET) to the more complex. He discusses the benefits and drawbacks of each. The techniques described cover most of the typical web-application needs. The more exotic ones – like stable page loads that return the same results even if elements are added or deleted from the collection – require more exotic solutions. They are usually expensive to compute.

An engineer’s guide to cloud capacity planning

Patrick McKenzie writes a great guide on how to plan server capacity in the cloud. He covers decoupling the applications with knowledge from it’s deployment environment, advises to automate provisioning and deployment, covers how to estimate capacity and what to focus on as traffic grows. This is another great article by Increment.

You Are Not Google

Ozan Onay reminds us that Google, Amazon and other tech giants have problems at scales that most in the industry don’t have. Adopting their practices might not suit your organization or project. As with most things in Engineering, choosing a good solution depends on deep understanding of the problem.

The Many Meanings of Event-Driven Architecture

Event-Driven Architecture means different things to different people. In this talk, Martin Fowler dives in to the nuances of what it means and provides a framework to talk about event drive in a meaningful way.

Postgres EXPLAIN Visualizer (pev)

This tool provides a handy way to visualize the results of an EXPLAIN query in Postgres. I found this very useful. I hope this would exists for other databases as well.

99 Bottles of OOP bills itself as a practical guide to writing cost-effective, maintainable and pleasing object-oriented code – otherwise known as “good” code. It delivers on that promise.

The Pomodoro technique is a popular time management method. I tried using for a few weeks at work. I am not planning on sticking with it, but I did learn some valuable lessons from the exercise.

Base CS: Exploring the basics of computer science, every Monday, for a year.

Vaidehi Joshi, embarked on an the admirable journey of writing a weekly post about computer science topics. She is calling the series BaseCS. I’ve found the content to be well written, concise and full of clear explanations and beautiful illustrations. As advertised, some of this content is basic computer science. I’ve enjoyed all the articles published so far.

Five Factor Testing

Sarah Mei lays out five practical reasons to write tests:

1. Verify the code is working correctly
2. Prevent future regressions
3. Document the code’s behavior
4. Provide design guidance
5. Support refactoring

Sara correctly points out that our individual approach to testing is a result of the importance that we give to each of these factors. Excellent post.

Writing English as a Second Language

As a Software Engineer I spend a good amount of my time writing emails, commenting on pull requests, Jira tickets, Slack, etc. In this transcript of a talk given to international journalism students, William Zinsser talks about what is good writing and in particular what is good writing in English. As I learned, it’s not necessarily the same as good writing in other languages. Since English is not my first language, I fall often into some of the traps outlined in the talk. Now I know how to fix them!