Mike Perham

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 somewhere in [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Well, I wrapped up my talk in Berlin yesterday at RailsConf Europe and I’m giving it one last time in Austin at LoneStarRubyConf before putting it out to pasture.  If you want to see the slides, you can find them here: How NOT to Build a Service (Keynote, 2.5MB) How NOT to Build a Service [...]

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I’m in the Czech Republic right now, touring Prague.  Now when I visit Google Reader, the UI is rendered in (presumably) Czech.  I checked my browser and it is set to show EN-US and then EN.  Then I checked my Reader settings and set the desired language to English.  Yet Google Reader still does not [...]

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Joe has written an excellent post about one of the more arcane scalability changes you can make to your ActiveRecord schema.  In essence, the performance problem is this: mysql tries to write rows in order of the primary key index and ActiveRecord creates an artificial PK called ID.  So if I write rows #19 and [...]

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This is an excellent summary of REST, why SOAP services should be considered broken and why your services should be RESTful.  One overlooked benefit of REST: interacting with the HTTP ecosystem correctly.  You might not be using a caching proxy on the server-side but if your clients want to use a caching proxy, making your [...]

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