iamcal.com

Chasing Waterfalls

It's long been known that waterfall is the superior model for developing software, and we finally (~12 years ago, but probably didn't hit its schedule) have a conference to discuss these important techniques.

Deploying at GitHub

I've been meaning to link to this for a while: Deploying at GitHub explains the develop/stage/deploy cycle at github, which can rougly be described as "Like Flickr, but with personal dev environments and using Git". It's light on technical details, but says a lot of the right things.

Blind hashing

In the wake of password-hacking-month (Linkedin, Last.fm, Yahoo, etc) Jeremy Spilman talks about an interesting idea for increasing the cost to stealing password databases, rather than just the hashing: part 1, part 2

Twelve-factor app

12 factor app says a lot of good things that i agree with, but the server-process model rule is odd. there doesn't seem to be an obvious reason why the php/apache/processes model is wrong, but it's not allowed. uh?

Uh, Travis?

I'd like to check out travis-ci, but loading it crashes chrome. How does it even do that?

Facebook Engineering Process

A nice read about facebook's release engineering approach. This should all sound very familiar to Flickr alumni.

8th June, 12:08 am

php sadness points out a lot of real issues, but it's still the best tool for many problems

27th May, 8:26 pm

damn, someone has figured out my secret

17th August, 4:30 am

noting these down for later reference - two excellent answers on quora from adam d'angelo on why quora uses mysql instead of postgres or a nosql solution. he says everything i've been saying for the last few years, but more eloquently

1st March, 3:13 am

warehouse looks pretty good, but it requires both ruby on rails (easy-ish to install) and the ruby-svn bindings (which are basically a bitch). why do the harder languages to get up and running on the web (ruby and python) require the bindings while the easier languages (php and perl) just shell out and so work easily? gah. currently using websvn in php which does a reasonable job and is trivial to set up.