Mike Perham

I was reading through some interview questions the other day and one of them was “What was the toughest lesson you’ve learned in your job?”
The answer came immediately: the hardest problems in your job are human problems and cannot be solved with software. As a software engineer facing a problem, I immediately consider if and [...]

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Google Analytics gives you some interesting data about your visitors.  Did you know I’ve never had anyone visit my site from North or South Dakota, Wyoming or Montana, but I have had 4 visits from Kansas?
Hello Kansas!

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Below is an interesting series of interviews by Tim O’Reilly on large web sites and their database usage.  Every single organization was sharding their data.  Note the series is over two years old and some advice is plainly wrong these days; note that Craigslist’s advice to use MyISAM “because it works” is no longer relevant.  [...]

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I just published a new Ruby Gem which encapsulates the database sharding library we’ve been using in production with our FiveRuns Manage service.  I’m pretty proud of this release - it wasn’t easy code to write or test and I learned a LOT about ActiveRecord while writing it.  If you need sharding and you need [...]

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One interesting tidbit I’ve learned by building tracknowledge, my race track database and instrumenting it with FiveRuns’s Manage service is the ridiculous amount of time required for calling third-party services. If you look at a sample track page, Donington Park, there’s three services being called: Youtube and Flickr are called server-side and Google Maps [...]

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I didn’t write TuneUp (Brian, Bruce and Matt McCray did) but it’s a great tool and it’s nice to see compliments like this in the blogosphere. Thanks Mr. metajack!
Finally! A Modern Development Tool « metajack

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Just when you think you are doing well, someone comes along and points out how dumb you are. I was discussing my need to patch ActiveRecord with Bruce today and mentioned how I would patch the Ruby files in the activerecord-2.0.2 gem on staging, test everything and then patch the same files on production.
Bruce [...]

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Looks like my talk “How NOT to Build a Service” has been accepted by the LSRC organizers. I really enjoyed the conference last year and it’s an honor to be chosen as one of the speakers this year.
The great thing about the LSRC is proximity: it’s two miles from my house. If anyone [...]

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With the rise of Flash-based video, screencasts are arguably one of the best things to happen to the Internets in the last 3 years. As they say, a picture really is worth 1000 words and having an expert show you how to do something is far better than describing the same thing in text. [...]

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This prints out “1″:

begin
a = 1
raise RuntimeError, “foo”
rescue => e
puts a
end

I would think that a would be out of scope inside the rescue section but I guess Ruby considers the rescue section part of the begin/end block?

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