There are cases where ownership of the data consumed by a fleet of microservices is distributed across several systems of record. Derived data is then scattered across multiple storage solutions, each designed to solve a specific problem using a subset of it. It may be mirrored and synchronized into a specific format …
Multiple data stores and eventual consistency using micro-services
The frontend backend debacle
Editor’s note (2026): This is a strongly worded 2010 opinion, not hiring or accessibility guidance. Modern web work includes both deep specializations and generalist roles; basic HTML and CSS syntax can be approachable, while production UI work also carries substantial accessibility and standards obligations. Current …
Programatica 2010 after thoughts
Editor’s note (2026): This is a contemporaneous conference report from 2010. Product names, prices, hosting sites, terminology, and feature comparisons below describe that moment and are not current purchasing guidance. Java EE later became Jakarta EE. CodePlex—not SourceForge—was Microsoft’s separate forge, and Microsoft …
Building a small blog cms in rails
Editor’s note (2026): This is a 2010 architectural sketch, not a current Rails security tutorial. RBAC is not inherently required for a single-author blog, production is not a substitute for automated or staging security tests, and authorization should fail closed under a current threat model. Current guidance Securing …
On Ruby modules and concerns
Modules are useful for highly specialized code that can be injected into other classes for fun and profit or for creating namespaces. An interesting approach is to use modules as an alternative to classical inheritance (without the usual trade-offs) : the core idea is to share an abstracted role that can be included in a …
Shedding some light into UUID version 4 in Ruby and Rails
Ruby's standard library and Rails's PostgreSQL adapter use by default version 4 UUIDs. This could be changed in Rails migrations via: Archive note (2015; updated context 2024): These excerpts describe Rails 4.2-era behavior, not current defaults. RFC 4122 was obsoleted by RFC 9562 in May 2024; UUIDv4 has 122 random bits …
The perils of writing request specs using concurrent-ruby under the JVM
This article describes a 2017 JRuby, concurrent-ruby, and RSpec setup. Current APIs, integrations, and behavior may differ, so the workaround below should be read as historical rather than current guidance. When I write an API, though I'm not a hard core TDD practitioner, I do like writing specs - especially request specs …
How to Web Conference, random thoughts, mostly live
Archive note (2026): The opening paragraph contains the corrupt fragment I’vevolatile and utopic place most of the time.; it cannot be reconstructed safely and is left untouched pending an original source or backup. Sadly, today I’ve arrived a bit late, where "a bit" means a lot; I’vevolatile and utopic place most of the …
On writing artisanal code
Every artisan at a certain point in time just stops and starts thinking about the inner workings of his craft. He ponders on the whole process from the outside while trying to make connections between apparently dissimilar entities that his craft is made of. One might argue that this is a purely subjective endeavor: well, …
Chunked transfer encoding in Rails (streaming)
Anyone who has written a little PHP knows what the flush() family of functions do. The ideal usage scenario for using chunked transfer[0] is when we have something costly to render e.g. the first three most recent articles on a blog. Why, one might ask? Why stream It is rather simple: in a normal Rails render, the server …
Buzzwords and manifestos
Editor’s note (2026): Here “NLP” refers to neuro-linguistic programming, not natural-language processing. Evidence reviews have found little support for claimed health outcomes. The HTTP-era links below may now be unavailable or changed. Source context Archived NHS introduction Do we really need them? I mean sometimes I …
Hierarchy of perceptions
I was thinking of the old conundrum of how we perceive the objective world or reality - it’s always through our limited sensory organs. Then it has to be processed: some small latency in the brain, maybe some evolutionary heuristics, our genetic background, etc. after all this we get a tainted fragment of the world. We …
The half-life of a programmer
Half-life (t1/2) is the amount of time required for the amount of something to fall to half its initial value. The term is very commonly used in nuclear physics to describe how quickly unstable atoms undergo radioactive decay, but it is also used more generally for discussing any type of exponential decay. I had this …
Ruby 2.2.0 Preview 1 quick Rails benchmarks
Great news everyone! Ruby 2.2 preview 1 has been released ! I'm really curious about the Incremental GC and Symbol GC so let's run some quick Rails benchmarks on a normal Rails API app. Archive note (2014): Ruby 2.2.0-preview1 was prerelease software and must not be used now. Ruby 2.2 reached end of life on 31 March 2018; …
Interesting links - Is logging a "code smell" ?
I was reading this article , and it raises quite an unexpected question - "Can we consider logging as a code smell"? Clearly - the answer is more nuanced than that and whilst I do enjoy the event bus approach from the article - that seems like overkill for most applications. It's interesting that Aspect Oriented …