License to SIGKILL
11 Jul 2015Every program wants to live forever. What happens when a program is forced to exit before it’s done running, and why would we want to do that?
How Ruby Uses Memory
11 May 2015I’ve never met a developer who complained about code getting faster or taking up less RAM. In Ruby, memory is especially important, yet few developers know the ins-and-outs of why their memory use goes up or down as their code executes. This article will start you off with a basic understanding of how Ruby objects relate to memory use, and we’ll cover a few common tricks to speed up your code while using less memory.
TechShop is Awesome
30 Apr 2015When we moved into our house on the East Side, the interior walls were all supported by 1 inch thick long leaf pine. A builder looking at the material during a site visit casually mentioned he would make something out of it. This peaked my interests and set me down my recent woodworking path. The only problem was that I didn’t have many tools.
Why is RubyGems Slow?
10 Apr 2015“Why exactly is RubyGems slow?” is the question that more than one developer has asked, but few have bothered to do anything about. Recently @mfazekas took up the task for profiling an especially slow case using dtrace. This resulted in several high profile pull requests to improve performance and drop memory allocations. These in turn lead me to ask the question, just what is Rubygems doing that takes so long? The short answer is, way more than you ever thought; for the long answer, keep reading.
Recruiter Sniping
08 Apr 2015I first started getting casual emails “we’ve been looking over your GitHub and we are impressed” and it was validation for me. I enjoyed the attention. It made me feel powerful. I eventually realized that more than a few of those emails came from bots. It was algorithmic, robotic attention. But so what? It still felt good. Occasionally I would get an email from a startup CEO that was personalized beyond a doubt with calls out to specific things I had done. That felt better. Over the years though, these messages went from uplifting, to annoying. These recruiters wanted something from me, they wanted me. But what did I want?
Three Years at Heroku - By the Numbers
26 Feb 2015This month marks my third year anniversary with Heroku. It’s the longest I’ve worked at a single company and has been the greatest single career move I’ve made to date.
Nothing Lasts Forever: Symbol Collection in Ruby 2.2
19 Jan 2015What is symbol GC and why should you care? Ruby 2.2 was just released and in addition to incremental GC, one of the other big features is Symbol GC. If you’ve been around the Ruby block, you’ve heard the term “symbol DoS”. A symbol denial of service attack occurs when a system creates so many symbols that it runs out of memory. This is because, prior to Ruby 2.2, symbols lived forever. For example in Ruby 2.1:
Debugging Super Methods in Ruby 2.2
14 Jan 2015Debugging a large codebase is hard. Ruby makes debugging easier by exposing method metadata and caller stack inside Ruby’s own process. Recently in Ruby 2.2.0 this meta inspection got another useful feature by exposing super method metadata. In this post we will look at how this information can be used to debug and why it needed to be added.
How (Not) to Troll GitHub Comments
09 Jan 2015Trolling is horrible and counter-productive; however, we can learn what NOT to do, by asking what a troll would write. Who am I to talk about trolling github comments? I wrote an app, which helps thousands of people get more visibility into open source discussions, so they can make better comments and help out. The service is called CodeTriage and it sends community issues right to your inbox.. Essentially, I read a lot of Github issues and comments. Time to pay the troll toll.
Going the Distance - How Levenshtein Spelling Suggestion Algorithm Works
27 Dec 2014I’m not what you would cosider an algorithm guy, but after needing to use a bit of spell checking in some code, I became fascinated with the Levenshtein distance. I found plenty of resources explaining what it did, I also found plenty of resources with example implementations. What I couldn’t find were any really simple explanations for exactly HOW it worked.
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