February Reading List

With February almost over, it’s time to give you news things to read, or at least to make a list of things I’ve been reading lately.

Fun with Ruby Block Parameters

I always forget what kinds of crazy things you can do with Ruby’s blocks and their parameters, so here’s a little write-up on them. I regularly forget things I’ve learned (must be an age thing), and I found that not even books on the Ruby language fully cover all the gory details on block (and method) parameters. So consider this my personal reference of crazy Ruby block syntax features for future use.

A Tour of Amazon’s DynamoDB

Amazon’s recent release of DynamoDB, a database whose name is inspired by Dynamo, the key-value database the distributed datastore they’ve been running in production for a good five to six years now. I think it’s great they’ve finally done it, though from my obverservations, there’s little resemblance of what the original Dynamo paper describes, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Traditionally Amazon hasn’t been very open about how they implement their services, so some of what I’m stating here may be nothing more than an educated guess. Either way, the result is pretty neat.

Holiday Reading List

Here’s a list of things I’ve been reading lately or that I’m about to read, and that I found to be worth sharing. If you’re looking for something to read over the holidays, I’m happy to give you some suggestions. Books, papers, articles, and videos, something for everyone.