Interview with Maciej Ceglowski of Pinboard

I’ve posted my interview with Maciej at my new blog: http://thuktun.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/an-interview-with-maciej-ceglowski-of-pinboard/ I heard about the hypergrowth that Pinboard experienced due to the mass migration of users from Delicious, and wanted to get his perspective on how he had managed the huge spike in traffic and new users, and to find out more about how he…

Continue reading

Some thoughts on “mentoring”

The idea of “mentoring” has always been a hot topic in the system administration community. This is reflected in the roots of the SAGE name, recognizing that the commmunity was (at that time) more like a Guild than a rigidly-defined and codified academic discipline. SAGE tried to create mentoring programs several times, but they never really took off, yet there were always people willing to take up the gauntlet again and again. At the first planning meeting for LOPSA (August 2005), we spent a lot of time talking about community and we seemed to all agree that mentoring was one of the most important parts of the community we were planning to serve. This topic was again raised at the LOPSA Community Meeting at LISA (December 2005) as one that our members felt strongly about. When we ask our members about what should be our highest priority services, a “mentoring program” always ranks near the top of the list.

We as a community seem to want a mentoring program, but before we begin again, shouldn’t we ask ourselves, ”’Why have sysadmin mentoring programs been less than stellar successes?”’
Continue reading

Ruby on Rails is a winner

(memo to self: Do not take on ANYTHING extra during the month before or the 3 weeks after E3.) The Ruby/Rails agile development *environment* is truly amazing, and the best “thing” I’ve ever seen for enabling rapid development. It’s been a while, but I was finally able to finish working through the sample application, the…

Continue reading

Go Go Gadget Shopping Cart!

Well, with less than 90 minutes (45 reading the book, 45 of coding and copying) I’ve got a shopping cart running. I’m finally getting the hang of this Rails thing. It’s clear that knowing the Rails helper functions and libraries is going to be at least as important as being able to write Ruby code….

Continue reading

Wanna buy a book? Ruby+Rails+mySQL == my private bookstore

Although I had some problems getting mySQL installed and talking to Ruby/Rails (all my fault!), once that was resolved, it took less than an hour or so to get the sample storefront up and running.

I’ve always been a fan of incremental development and “scaffolding”, and Rails is the very first programming system I’ve seen that really, really supports this model, and damn well.

Continue reading

Ruby on Rails – mySQL and other fun

When last we left our intrepid Ruby/Rails explorer, he had just completed part I (chapter 5) and had a running toy application. He was preparing to create his first Ruby on Rails application that used mySQL. Of course, this would be the work of but a moment, because mySQL is always trivial to install, never…

Continue reading

Trends, Origins and Values

Well, I’m back. It was an incredibly hectic week at LISA, and I’m still digging out at work from being gone for the week. I hope to finally get all the pieces of this essay done in the next 2 weeks. There have been lots of developments in the USENIX, SAGE and LOPSA relationships. I…

Continue reading