a tornado of razorblades

Michael Lopp writes about his evolution from a developer into a manager of developers. Lots of good stuff here. For example, on meetings:

The following are what I believe to be the three most important areas of radical (vs. evolutionary) innovation in web application server components over the coming 6 - 18 months:

My partner Orion Henry coined the term Cascading Global Failure, or CGF, to describe a type of catastrophe situation in production software deployments. (The term is inspired by the movie No Country For Old Men, in a line spoken by Tommy Lee Jones as he surveys a scene of mayhem and carnage early in the movie.)

When we say that an http request takes 300ms on the server side, that number actually encompasses two phases. One phase is the time the request spends in the backlog, waiting for an available backend process (mongrel/thin/dyno). The second phase is how long it takes to process the request once it reaches the backend process. Conflating these two is a mistake, as it masks important information about what steps you can take to make your app able to handle more traffic.

Sharing values is the most important part of effective collaboration. If you don’t have significant overlap on values between you and your teammates, you’re going to have a tough time getting anything accomplished.

It’s no secret that I try to avoid requiring ActiveSupport when I can. But one thing I do really like about it is the time capabilities. Stuff lke this:

I’m fairly convinced that the relational database paradigm - which in practice means SQL databases - is on its last leg. There are is a growing array of excellent options for document or key-value datastores which sidestep all the scaling issues and complexity of SQL databases: CouchDB, Redis, Tokyo Tyrant, Memcachedb, and MongoDB are some of the front-runners.

When a Rack-based framework (Rails >= 2.3, Sinatra, etc) serves a static file, it uses the Rack mimetimes hash to map the file’s extension to the Content-Type header on the response. For example, serving text/plain for .txt, or image/jpeg for .jpg.

Ryan Tomayko and I chat it up with Mike Malloy on New Relic’s RailsLab videos.

In a slowly changing society, which is to say almost all of human history, older people, while they may not run as fast or even think as fast as younger people, knew more. So it makes sense to have institutional structures in which, on average, older people have authority over younger people.