If your application grows and you need to support more customers, there is the common wisdom to buy more hardware. Or solve performance problems with more hardware. But the simple math says there is a point where investing in software or OS optimization is much cheaper than buying more hardware. There are essentially three ways [...]

Actors are the new concurrency. They are everywhere. People make bold claims about actors, and while I do not agree with many of them, two in particular I regard as myths. Here they are: Actors are a shared nothing architecture Actors are easier to get right because of their shared nothing architecture I know I’m alone with calling [...]

Tail recursion seems to be an easy concept, but most people get it wrong – including me. Reading the latest German Java SPEKTRUM, I’ve found an article about parallel multicore development by Kornelius Fuhrer. One paragraph was about functional development and tail recursion. First he claims tail recursion makes functions 100% parallizeable (I guess broadly [...]

During the dot com bubble, I was a founder and startup CTO. At the beginning I wondered what to do as a CTO. There were many conflicting views on that position. From programming to vision, from technology to processes, from tools to people. After some time and more years at managing development teams and departments, [...]

BigPipe is a way of thinking for web pages. It introduces the concept of pagelets, small parts of the website. BigPipe was implemented at Facebook: BigPipe is a fundamental redesign of the dynamic web page serving system. The general idea is to decompose web pages into small chunks called pagelets, and pipeline them through several execution [...]

Updates: 1. I do love Scala as proven by this blog 2. I’m critical of the things I love 3. I’m ok with a language that is marketed as a research language, I’m not ok if this language markets itself as post functional, the next big thing and a Java successor. Update 2: Community response as [...]

I’ve started continuous deployment on http://2morethin.gs/. Currently this is a Play framework site with Scala as a programming language and Scalate modules for templating. The setup is two play instances behind one HAProxy, fed by hooks into a Mercurial repository. Morre details on how continuous deployment will follow. Sign up to the BETA newsletter if you’re [...] 1

I’ve started continuous deployment on http://2morethin.gs/. Currently this is a Play framework site with Scala as a programming language and Scalate modules for templating. The setup is two play instances behind one HAProxy, fed by hooks into a Mercurial repository. Morre details on how continuous deployment will follow. Sign up to the BETA newsletter if you’re [...]

First let me tell you a tale. Then let us see what we can learn for software development. Last week I was on honeymoon in Rome. What a wonderful time, perhaps except the time we were cheated by taxi drivers and restaurant owners, a story for another post. When arriving at the airport for flying [...]

First let me tell you a tale. Then let us see what we can learn for software development. Last week I was on honeymoon in Rome. What a wonderful time, perhaps except the time we were cheated by taxi drivers and restaurant owners, a story for another post. When arriving at the airport for flying [...] 13

There is some more discussion of Scala vs. Clojure. With the Oracle deal, and some discussions about the slow Java 7 release, it looks like Java is detoriating faster not slower. So discussions about Java succession increase. I’ve discussed Scala vs. Clojure here, here and here. Greg Osuri now adds his take in “Scala Vs [...] 61

There is some more discussion of Scala vs. Clojure. With the Oracle deal, and some discussions about the slow Java 7 release, it looks like Java is detoriating faster not slower. So discussions about Java succession increase. I’ve discussed Scala vs. Clojure here, here and here. Greg Osuri now adds his take in “Scala Vs [...]

I’m obsessed with metrics. I’m obsessed with the number of RSS subscribers. With Google PageRank. Google seems to push faster internet to everyone, with fiber to the home, their own DNS, the page speed plugin and hosting Ajax libraries. As I wanted to get some more Google love, going from PR4 to PR5 and not [...]

I’m obsessed with metrics. I’m obsessed with the number of RSS subscribers. With Google PageRank. Google seems to push faster internet to everyone, with fiber to the home, their own DNS, the page speed plugin and hosting Ajax libraries. As I wanted to get some more Google love, going from PR4 to PR5 and not [...] 20

Recently I’ve been playing more seriously with the Play-Framework. Play is a newer rapid development web stack for developing web applications. My impressions in short: this is a very nicely framework for write applications, with much potential but which is at the very beginning. This means there aren’t awfully many features available (compare with Lift, [...]

Reading the recent flamory piece “I Can’t Wait for NoSQL to Die” from Ted Dziuba, I thought the author is wrong on so many levels. Or as Jeremy writes: Well done, Ted. I laughed to myself a few times reading your post. Not that I’m a NoSQL zealot, see my The Dark Side of NoSQL, but Ted [...]

Many times I’ve seen fat UI layers and waded through molasses of unreadable business logic. Why are UI layers growing fat so fast? Because for most developers it seems to be the easiest thing to stuff code and logic into the web layer – I’ve done that too! No need to create new classes, no [...]