I've written before that Cassandra's achilles' heel is devops: Storage, redundancy and performance are expanded by adding more nodes. This can happen during normal business hours as long as consistency parameters are met. Same applies to node replacements. As the number of servers grows be prepared to hire a devops army or look for a … Continue reading Ordered Sets and Logs in Cassandra vs SQL
Category: Analysis
Two developers choose to take a class
Here is a wednesday funny for you: Two developers decide to take a class to improve their skills. One takes a day-long class on "Building scalable web applications with MongoDB." The other one takes a class on "Basket Weaving." Next day they compare their notes. One of them is an expert basket weaver, the other … Continue reading Two developers choose to take a class
On apprenticeship
When I was a freshman at Clarkson in 1996 there was a work-study program they called Student-Directed Computing Services. It was an effort to recruit students and get their help in wiring the campus for high speed Internet. It was thanks to that program that by the end of that year I had a real … Continue reading On apprenticeship
Software Engineering and Domain Area Expertise
When I was in college taking freshman year chemistry I wanted to have a leg up on my finals. Chemistry wasn't my thing, but I wasn't horrible at it. I was getting Bs and Cs. I set out to write a program for my TI-92 graphing calculator that could look up chemical elements from periodic … Continue reading Software Engineering and Domain Area Expertise
Docker can fundamentally change how you think of server deployments
I got a chance to evaluate Docker over the past few days. This is a type of a toolkit that is going to fundamentally change how you think of application deployments, in the cloud or on-premises. What Docker boils down to is this. Rather than deploying your application in a dedicated VM or hardware, and … Continue reading Docker can fundamentally change how you think of server deployments
Cassandra: Lessons Learned
After using Cassandra for 3 years since version 0.8.5, I thought I'd put together a blurb on lessons learned. Here it goes! Use Cases What works Anything that involves high speed collection of data for analysis in the background or via batch. For example: Logging and data collection Web servers Mobile devices Internet of things … Continue reading Cassandra: Lessons Learned
On working from home and remote teams
As some of you may know I have been working from my home office for the past couple of years. I am often asked what is it like, or whether I am productive, and so I decided to put my thoughts down in this blog post. Exactly two years ago I decided to take on … Continue reading On working from home and remote teams
Thanking MIT Scratch
I wrote in January that computers might have become too complicated to be used effectively for teaching kids how to program. I learned how to program on a very simple computer that had BASIC as the only way to interact with it; even to load a game I had to know how to type in … Continue reading Thanking MIT Scratch
“Hello, World!” Using Apache Thrift
Apache Thrift is a remarkable piece of technology. It is orders of magnitude more light weight than any XML or JSON based protocol and it is much easier to use than SOAP, CORBA, or EJB. I wanted to cover some of my bases before I recommend it at work, so I wrote a hello world … Continue reading “Hello, World!” Using Apache Thrift
Scripting News: After X years programming
Dave Winer, as always, puts it well: First, most people don't program that long. The conventional wisdom is that you move up into management long before you've been coding for 37 years. Only thing is I don't see programming as a job, I see it as a creative endeavor. And I drew a big circle … Continue reading Scripting News: After X years programming
The Dulin Report 
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