by mtodd
CodeConf Recap
April 9th and 10th in San Francisco was the first ever CodeConf. Read on for a recap on this incredibly insightful and wonderful conference.
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Virtually every application we push to production relies very heavily on open source code in one way or another. This means we’re utilizing the experience, knowledge, and expertise of the OSS (Open Source Software) community to solve many of our problems. Things that would’ve taken us quite a bit of time, money, and effort to iterate on in order to bring the quality to something on par with the OSS options are freely available and open for us to incorporate in our projects.
A little over a year ago, I weighed about 80 pounds more than I do today. Today, I am healthy, strong, energetic, happy, and more confident. Losing the weight took a lot of work, but that wasn’t really the goal, and it’s certainly not the end, either. The real motivation was to live healthier and be happier, and the real goal was (and is) always changing. To do this, I had to put lots of small choices into context: will this make me happier and healthier? Lots of small choices and small steps got me closer to my next, small goal. This, I realized, is a lot like how we approach “Big Projects” or “Big Goals” at Highgroove.
We’re still recovering from RubyConf (specifically the 10k, Jonathan’s first ever, has yet to release its iron grip on his calves), but we have had some time to reflect on what value we at Highgroove extracted from the conference.
by mtodd
RailsRumble 2010 Redux
“On your mark, get set, GO!” Nothing like the thrill of starting an intense race, whether it be a short hundred-meter dash or a long, grueling marathon.
by mtodd
Knowing How To Solve Your Problem
It’s late Friday afternoon, I’m angry at this problem I’ve been working on for an hour (or more), but I’m stuck. The sun is out and a cool breeze is blowing softly outside and I want to be riding my bicycle through the streets of Atlanta at full speed! Right now, I can think of nothing more than how much I hate this bug. I’m stumped.
What do I do?
by mtodd
Making the Case for Redis
Most database-backed applications, especially Ruby applications written in Rails do fine with a SQL Database, like MySQL. Adam Wiggins of Heroku does a great job explaining how SQL Databases are an Overapplied Solution. There are definitely a few cases we’ve seen where a NoSQL solution like Redis can really shine.
At Highgroove, we’ve got several projects utilizing the Redis key-value store. Here are a few reasons you might want to look into Redis:
1) “Data is frequently written, infrequently read” – if you are making tons of writes and MySQL can’t keep up, Redis has been clocked at 110000 SETs (the INSERT equivalent) per second!
2) “Data can be expired” – if you have data that can be expired on a regular basis, over time, or explicitly, like stats, logs, and session data, Redis can explicitly expire whole keys or quickly trim large lists of data in no time.
3) “Data is a collection of COUNTs, or SUMs of other data.” – if you have ever written an UPDATE statement that adds +1 to a record, you probably know that it is quite expensive, and could possibly be wrong. Redis has built in support for incrementing and decrementing values, quickly.
We love SQL Databases, so you won’t see us abandoning them any time soon, but we enjoy adding tools like Redis to our toolbelt.
More Information on Redis:
Redis Project Page – http://code.google.com/p/redis/
Redis (wikipedia entry) – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redis_
A Collection of Redis Use Cases – http://www.paperplanes.de/2010/2/16/a_collection_of_redis_use_cases.html
Trying to handle image manipulation, creating PDFs, or in-memory caching in pure Ruby is like trying to win the Tour de France on your hipster single-speed bike. The single-speed works 90% of the time, but when you have demanding performance requirements, it’s not good enough. Many popular Ruby libraries, such as MySQL/PostgreSQL, RMagick, and most of the webservers Ruby applications are deployed on (like Passenger, Mongrel, and Thin), harness the blazing speed of the C language and libraries to handle the heavy lifting and performance-intensive business that Ruby can’t keep up with on its own.
In some of my recent work, I had the opportunity to delve into and expand on a Ruby extension written in C for looking up geographic information based on IPs. This library was vital to one of our client’s projects that has immense performance requirements without the possibility of full request caching. By utilizing the existing GeoIP C library for accessing their special in-memory binary database, we were able to keep up with the demand the application would be seeing.
As is common at Highgroove Studios, along with making sure our contributions to the library were open sourced, I took the lessons and experience gained from this unusual endeavor and presented them to our local Ruby User Group here in Atlanta. I focused more on exposing the bridge between the Ruby and the C environments and understanding the internals of the Ruby language from a C standpoint. However, armed with this knowledge, any Rubyist is able to open up most any Ruby extension or even the Ruby language implementation itself and understand what’s going on. My goal was to get the developers over the initial hurdle of being able to read the code and understand it enough to investigate further.
Personally, I gained from this experience a better appreciation for the real beauty of the Ruby language and the effort required to make it as fluid and dynamic as it is as well as having a more thorough understanding of the internal workings of the language. Working this close to the language core has also made a difference on my Ruby style, both in trying to fight the language less but to also use it more efficiently and effectively.
For more information, check out the presentation slides1 and some of the C examples I wrote for the presentation2. Also check out the GeoIP I contributed to which inspired this whole adventure3.
1 http://www.slideshare.net/maraby/writing-ruby-extensions