sql
I thought Ligaya Turmelle’s post on SQL joins was a great primer for novice developers. Since SQL joins appear to be set-based, the use of Venn diagrams to explain them seems, at first blush, to be a natural fit. However, like the commenters to her post, I found that
ruby on rails
Twitter is a victim of its own success. The site has massive scaling problems, to the tune of 11,000 pageviews per second. According to this interview with a Twitter developer, a lot of the scaling problems are attributable to Twitter’s choice of platform: By various metrics Twitter is
database
In a recent article, Doug Reilly makes a fairly well reasoned case for the use of stored procedures in lieu of ad-hoc SQL: So, should you use SPs or ad-hoc SQL? The answer is “it depends.” I have placed myself firmly on the side of doing all database access through