a tornado of razorblades

If you’ve been using polling to track Twitter search terms (totally random example), you may have wondered if there is a more efficient and reliable method. The Twitter streaming API is a potential solution.

A company with a culture of quitting does not have ex-employees; they have alumni. This is far more than a semantic distinction. An alumni relationship is positive; something that people can take pride in; and one that keeps the door open for further opportunities on both ends.

Normally I’m not much for farewell posts (they’re metaposts, which I don’t like in general), but Joel Spolsky's pseudo-retirement shows a self-aware sense of humor that I respect:

Graph databases are a type of datastore which treat the relationship between things as equally important to the things themselves. Examples of datasets that are natural fits for graph databases:

We just don’t write or release software the way we used to. Software isn’t so much built as it is grown. Software isn’t shipped … it’s simply made available by, often literally, the flip of a switch. This is not your father’s software. 21st century development is a seamless path from innovation to release where every phase of development, including release, is happening all the time. Users are on the inside of the firewall in that respect and feedback is constant. If a product isn’t compelling we find out much earlier and it dies in the data center. I fancy these dead products serve to enrich the data center, a digital circle of life where new products are built on the bones of the ones that didn’t make it.

If you’ve used GMail, Google Calendar, or other Google web apps on the iPhone, you’ve probably noticed that they store the app code in a local cache. Only the messages (or day’s events, or other dynamic data) are fetched when you load the app. This is because they use HTML5’s capabilities for offline caching.

A PaaS Platform as a Service environment is a bit like a swan on a pond – graceful and elegant above the water, and paddling its little legs off below the water. The aforementioned abstraction provides the elegant user experience “above the water,” while high levels of automation provide the “paddling” beneath the surface.

Kevin Kelly writes on how the internet has changed how he thinks:

Ryan Dahl’s talk on Node.js presents a clear and cogent argument for event-driven I/O. The first ten minutes could just as easily be a pitch for EventMachine or Twisted (touching on one of my own battlecries: threads suck). But he then follows on by pointing out that these libraries will never be truly intuitive to use, because event-driven I/O is enough of a fundamental shift that it requires deep language integration. This is why he ceated Node.js: Javascript, it turns out, is a fundamentally event-driven language because of its origins in the browser. I find it interesting to note that this is also the exact argument for Erlang.

I’ve given over maintenance of RestClient to Julien Kirch (archiloque). He's got a 1.1 release now in Gemcutter/Rubyforge, with some hot new features: