Category: Programming


Refactoring Prioritization Through Instrumentation

Recently, I had the opportunity to rework a 15,000 line code base in Go. The intention was never to be a total rewrite, merely an update to a neglected app that just hummed along for years with few updates just doing what it was supposed to do. This exercise begged the question, how should I …

Adding Features to NSQ

After being a fairly heavy user of NSQ over the past year or so and finding that it was missing a few features, I decided to jump in and try to add them myself. The only issue was that I didn’t know Go. Since something as simple as not knowing the language the application was …

Learning to Hardware Hack at RobotsConf

I’ve been a programmer (if you can call me that) for quite a few years now. But for the most part, it’s really always been about designing software based systems. Even though these systems are larger than the average startup or SaaS company would get to work with, it’s (as I said) still about designing …

Common Pig One Liners

As with any programming language, there is a bit of a learning curve with Pig. So here are a few common items that I found useful. If you know Pig, please feel free to add your own in the comments section.

JSON Benchmarks in jRuby

I am in the process of switching a major application from MRI Ruby (specifically 1.8.7-p302) using many C extensions to jRuby (currently trying 1.5.3-master). In my application, performance is extremely important. It is so important in fact, that I will be writing about some of my experiences in troubleshooting the speed and getting those important …

Hash Autovivification in Ruby

One of the features that I miss most from my Perl days (and to be honest, there isn’t a whole lot I miss from my Perl days) is autovivification. For more information on what it is, read the wikipedia page on it here.

Interesting Object Methods in Ruby

This little Rubyism is something that I use frequently for debugging my objects. I add a method to every object to show only the interesting methods. What do I mean by interesting methods?

Stopping Curb From Segfaulting

While trying to get the curb gem up and running using Ruby 1.8.7p174, I kept getting segmentation faults. I Google’d around and really wasn’t able to come up with much other than lots of people saying not to use ports here. Since I don’t use Mac Ports, I use Homebrew, I figured this wasn’t an …

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