Stranger in a Strange Land From a guy named “Linus.” Last name, “Torvalds.” Enough said.
Oct 292008
Unless you’re not a Software Engineer, or you are but have spent the past 18 months on a different planet, you’ve probably heard all about how Rails 2.0 is RESTful. Now, before we get too far into what exactly “RESTful” means, let’s set a reference point: the only document I am aware of that nobody disputes — too much, anyway — is Roy Fielding’s dissertation on Representational State Transfer (REST). So, for the sake of brevity, let’s assume we don’t need to elaborate the finer points of the REST architectural style and just take Fielding’s work at face value. Resources and Rails REST basically states that messages between system components — like browsers and servers — are requests and responses that represent resources. That is to say, resources [...]
Recently, my company’s corporate wiki started to sputter. It isn’t that Atlassian Confluence itself is a dog, but when you load it with over 100K+ pages, hundreds of simultaneous users, many GBs of attachments in the DB, and try to run it on Windows 2003 Std and SQL Server 2000, things get rather dicey. (Add in the fact that the same hardware is used for a half dozen other production apps, including our enterprise JIRA install, and you have a recipe for failure.) So, for various reasons, we decided to move Confluence to its own dedicated environment: Ubuntu 8.04 with a MySQL backend. I don’t intend to make this a detailed HOWTO — I can’t imagine that any two migrations will ever be identical. Instead, I’ll point out [...]
One of the most counter-intuitive ideas baked into Agile software development is the concept of the last responsible moment, as Jeff Atwood writes about. In a nutshell, the idea is this: Since it is best to make decisions with the most information possible, we should wait until the last responsible moment to do so, because it’s at that moment we’ll have the most information available to us. Clearly, to buy into this concept, we must make a few assumptions. First, we must assume that the passing of time does, in fact, allow us to gather more information. If this doesn’t happen — say, we all go on vacation for 2 weeks and put the whole bit out of our minds — then the concept is bust. However, this [...]
