Mike Perham

Here’s an interesting talk from Reginald Braithwaite on Ruby code manipulation. I’m wondering if the difficulties he’s found in trying to build macro processing in Ruby is intrinstic in Ruby’s design. It seems like macros are a fringe feature in Ruby, but a core feature in Lispy languages due to language design. [...]

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Here’s the video for my RubyConf 2008 talk, Patterns in Distributed Computing.

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A very good overview of consensus, the fundamental problem in distributed computing. My talk and politics project deal heavily in this stuff.
Consensus Protocols: Two-Phase Commit at Paper Trail

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This blog is usually dry and technical. Let’s go off the beaten path and have a bit of fun with a caption contest. Meet Steve and his pet rat. What is he saying?

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I’m going to be introducing my new Politics gem at RubyConf 2008 tomorrow. This gem provides a few modules which solve a couple of distributed computing problems we were having at FiveRuns in providing fault tolerant, scalable processing across many machines.
Here’s my RubyConf slides (1MB, Keynote), minus the screencasts I created to demo the [...]

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The guys at EnvyCasts gave me the opportunity to take their new screencast for a test drive. They’ve produced a 44 minute video and accompanying 118-page PDF covering all the changes in Rails 2.2. They call it “The Ultimate Guide to Rails 2.2″ but is it marketing hype, solid as a rock, or [...]

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I like Rails’s config.gem feature: it’s simple and gives you a lot of functionality for cheap, much like Rails itself.  I just spent half a day tracking down a problem because we were overusing it.
I tend to be fanatical about minimizing dependencies as it has bit me several times in the past.  In this case, [...]

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I’m going to be speaking at a few groups/conferences over the next two months:

San Franscisco Ruby Meetup, Oct 16th
Austin on Rails, Austin TX, Oct 28th
RubyConf 2008, Orlando FL, Nov 6-8th
Raleigh.rb, Raleigh NC, Nov 18th

I’ll be giving my new “Patterns in Distributed Computing” talk, discussing some of the hard problems in the distributed computing space and [...]

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This is an amazing set of six pages which cover beginning and intermediate MySQL performance tuning.  If you want to learn about tuning your MySQL database, start here.
InformIT: MySQL Query Optimization

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Good News Everybody!  I’ll be speaking at RubyConf 2008 in Orlando, FL in November on “Patterns in Distributed Computing”.  I’m going to discuss the various algorithms we’ve used to provide fault tolerance, reliablility and performance from server-side processing daemons.
In other news, this week marks my first anniversery in the professional Ruby world.  I’m pretty happy [...]

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