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When I speak with engineering leaders, I sometimes get asked to endorse an underway plan to spin up a “follow the sun” on-call rotation. Instead of one team taking pages for the full day, they’ll split the load into 2 twelve hour shifts or 3 eight hour shifts. My advice is not what folks anticipate: please don’t. “Follow the sun” model is an evolutionary dead end for engineering on-call rotations.

When the engineering team at Digg was acquired into SocialCode, we had a generous supply of technical and cultural puzzles to think through, but the most immediate challenge was scaling process for an engineering team whose membership doubled overnight. While I’ve argued that service oriented architectures are for scaling people, they probably aren’t the mechanism of first resort for scaling your

A month ago history reset with the second launch of Digg v1, and memories are starting to fade since much of the Digg team joined SocialCode four months ago, so it seemed like a good time to describe the system and team architecture which ran and developed Digg.com from May 2010 until May 2012. There won’t be controversy here, not even much of a narrative, just a description of how we were working

A coworker and I were designing a solution to a rather interesting problem yesterday and we realized we needed a more in-depth understanding of the memory usage of the various datatypes in Redis to squeeze as much storage out of Redis as possible. Among other things we also wanted to verify some of statements in the Redis documentation, e.g. are hashes really preferable to creating pseudo-hashes b

最近にJohn ResigのProcessing.jsが出た。その面白いプロジェクトを使って、Processingのコードをウェブブラウサーで走られる。今から少しだけなぜ面白いと考えって、後で使い方を説明する（説明しようとする方かな）。 なぜProcessing.jsは面白い？その質問に[色々な答え]1あるけど、今は二つだけ言う。 最初、Processingの目的と仕方はとてもいい考えだけど、Javaのシンタクスはかなり使いにくいと思う。ずっと前から何かRubyやPythonのようなシンタクスがあればいいかなと思っていた。それで、JavaScriptが使えることを気について、ちょっと喜んだ。Processingの目的はなるべく簡単なプログラムを作ることだって、JavaScriptでJavaよりその夢ができると思う。 もちろん普通のProcessingのシンタクスも使えるけど、JavaScr

Recently, I've been thinking about aggregating logs from multiple machines. Although there are undoubtedly many approaches to this problem, I decided to write a simple HTTP server which would accept logs and then create a script which would monitor files for changes and POST them to the HTTP server. As an experiment I went ahead and did it with node.js because I hadn't done any projects with it ye

Two of the tools I use most frequently in my writing (both public writing on this blog and notes I jot down for personal consumption) are graphviz and markdown. The last few days I've been tossing around the idea of embedding Graphviz graphs into Markdown, and today I had a couple of hours to quickly throw it together. The proof of concept, python-markdown-graphviz, is available on Github. I chose

A coworker (need to figure out his hidden blog so I can link back to him... :) forwarded a message my way from an Erlang mailing list regarding BeepBeep, which seemed like a fairly exciting project given that it combines something I am using at work but need more practice with--Erlang--and flavors it with a familiar spice: Django. This tutorial will walk through installation, creation and (kind-of

In this example we're going to take a closer look at the flexibility of Django's loose coupling philosophy by replacing its default templating language with Jinja2. Jinja2 is a very similar template language to the one provided by Django, but provides additional functionality like more flexible if syntax in templates, the option to raise an error when an undefined object is operated upon within te

Genetic algorithms are a mysterious sounding technique in mysterious sounding field--artificial intelligence. This is the problem with naming things appropriately. When the field was labeled artificial intelligence, it meant using mathematics to artificially create the semblance of intelligence, but self-engrandizing researchers and Isaac Asimov redefined it as robots. The name genetic algorithms

Yesterday I wrote briefly about my development to deployment pipeline, and I very briefly mentioned Fabric, which is a Capistrano-like tool written in Python that helps remove mindless repetition from deployment. For a long time I was content with the SSH into the server and do stuff approach to deployment (I'm not managing any large deployments, and am usually dealing with small projects without

There are quite a number of tutorials looking at using Ajax with Django. Despite that, it is still a topic that leaves many confused. I think the fundamental issue is that there are three very different groups looking for tutorials on using Ajax with Django: Experienced web developers who have used a multitude of other frameworks (and used to administer networks composed of passenger pigeons in th

最近にJohn ResigのProcessing.jsが出た。その面白いプロジェクトを使って、Processingのコードをウェブブラウサーで走られる。今から少しだけなぜ面白いと考えって、後で使い方を説明する（説明しようとする方かな）。 なぜProcessing.jsは面白い？その質問に[色々な答え]1あるけど、今は二つだけ言う。 最初、Processingの目的と仕方はとてもいい考えだけど、Javaのシンタクスはかなり使いにくいと思う。ずっと前から何かRubyやPythonのようなシンタクスがあればいいかなと思っていた。それで、JavaScriptが使えることを気について、ちょっと喜んだ。Processingの目的はなるべく簡単なプログラムを作ることだって、JavaScriptでJavaよりその夢ができると思う。 もちろん普通のProcessingのシンタクスも使えるけど、JavaScr

Along with the release of Leopard (OS X 10.5) came the release of PyObjC 2.0 which made getting started with a PyObjC project a snap. However, a fair number of people have remarked that there is not a comprehensive up-to-date tutorial on getting started with PyObjC 2.0 on Leopard. Having developed Cocoa applications using both Objective-C and PyObjC, it's my experience that PyObjC lets you build c

Welcome to the final installment of this series, which has looked at the advantages of Django's loose binding philosophy. At first, we looked at replacing Django's templating system with Jinja2. Next, we looked at using SQLAlchemy instead of Django's ORM, and in this third segment we are going to look at using CouchDB instead of a traditional object relational database for data storage. CouchDB is

Inspired by an article by Andrew Chen about using Google Insights to look at adoption of some web apps, I decided to put together a similar comparison looking at the global popularity of programming languages. The languages I chose to look at were (in alphabetical order): Common Lisp, Erlang, Groovy, Haskell, Java, Objective C, OCaml, Perl, Python, Ruby, Scala, and Scheme. I performed the searches

This article is not particularly polished, and expects some general Django knowledge. It does not require any JQuery experience. Using Django with JQuery for Ajax is pretty easy, but figuring out how to do do a autocomplete form can be a bit more complex. So, here is a walkthrough. I am using Frank Vega's autocomplete library. It is a bit simple, but entirely usable. Grab the javascript, and the c

So, I have been playing with Ruby a bit more recently, and I really wanted a GUI to play with too. I have had Why the Lucky Stiff in my RSS reader for a while, and I had been absently reading about his current project, Shoes, which is a GUI toolkit for Ruby. After using it for a couple of days, I'd say its worth a look. What is Shoes?So grammatically "What is Shoes?" hurts me slightly, but I think