Most of the design books you read, including my own, are about how to be a good, competent designer. They are about how to make strong, reasoned design decisions and about design methods and tools. But what they won’t—can’t—teach you is how to become a great designer.The only way to be a great designer is to produce great products. Everything else is…well, everything else. I’m convinced that the people who are great designers, while assuredly they’re both talented and experienced, have taken extra measures to ensure that what they produce...

If you’re one of those hipster programmers who loves Clojure, Ruby, Scala, Erlang, or whatever, you probably deeply loathe Java and all of its giant configuration files and bloated APIs of AbstractFactoryFactoryInterfaces. I used to hate all that stuff too. But you know what? After working for all these months on these huge pieces of Twitter infrastructure I’ve started to love the AbstractFactoryFactories.Let me explain why. Consider this little Scala program. It uses “futures”, which are a way to schedule computation to be done in parallel from the main flow of a pro...

Everyone loves to talk about benchmarks. AMD’s Andy Parma recently wrote a blog that covers the top performance scores for the AMD Opteronâ„¢ 6200 Series processors. As marketing professionals, of course that’s what we talk about. What’s important to look at is the reality as well – what customers are actually purchasing. When you drive past car dealership, you’ll always see the fancy red sports car prominently displayed. It draws people in – it’s what the car dealers purposely put there for you to view and think about. But what ve...

If you Google “Java is the new COBOL” you’ll find a glut of articles proliferating this mantra. I don’t know its origins, however I’m inclined to think it’s mostly repeated (and believed) by the Ruby community. Ruby, from a developer’s perspective is a low-friction language. A developer can just sit down at a text editor and start banging out code without really thinking about such superflous things as types. Java on the other hand, well, you have to think a lot about types. Java is a statically typed language after all, and it makes the deve...

How does a good developer become a great developer?Forget greatness for a moment: How does a decent developer become a good developer?There is no definitive path from Step 1 to Step n. Heck, it's not even clear what Step n is. And as logically-minded developer types, the lack of a well-defined route can make for a daunting journey from novice to master.I've spent a fair bit of time over the last few years bumping up against this conundrum. What's next? How do I go from being a good developer to a being really good developer?What Does Success Look Like?I do my best work...

The Ruby language is beautiful. And I think it deserves to break free from the Web. I think the future of Ruby is firmly stuck in Web development, though, so I’m going to invest in a new language for data analysis, at least for now. This is a look at the fantastic language I came to from Java and a look at a possible candidate. (Update: I’ve since written a followup.)Java to RubySix years ago, I added Ruby to my technical arsenal. I learned C++ and Java in high school, and I planned to use them for data analysis in college—mainly for research kung fu. But when I disco...

I see a lot of people on forums and on my training courses asking about the best way (or any way) to manage dates stored in a MySQL database and used in PHP. Three options follow, but first the problem.PHP uses unix timestamps for all its date functionality. It has methods to convert these timestamps into pretty much any text format you could want but internally it uses the timestamp format. A timestamp is simply an integer. Specifically, it’s the number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight on January 1st 1970 (greenwich mean time).MySQL has three date types f...

The MySQL family has been innovating rapidly. New features need names and sometimes those names are confusing. Describing something as multi-master or a NoSQL solution has confused me.Multi-master requires one of conflict prevention, conflict resolution or faith. MySQL Cluster provides both conflict prevention and resolution as described in these great posts. Regular MySQL has minimal support for conflict prevention (auto-increment-offset can prevent insert conflicts) and thus requires faith that the application does the right thing. Regular MySQL gets conflict pr...