Why I Love and Hate Distributed Systems

Let me go ahead and say it: I love distributed systems. Why? Simply because they bend my brain. Yesterday I tweeted “Distributed databases are my happy place.” One response I got was along the lines of: “then you’re probably not running a distributed database in production.” Busted! But does it matter? We all love distributed stuff, we love thinking about scaling. They seem like problems everyone wants to have and solve.

An Inconvenient Caveat about MongoDB’s Replica Sets (updated)

Update: Read the comments and below. The issue is not as bad as it used to be in the documentation and the original design, thankfully.

10 Annoying Things About CouchDB

Hi, I’m Mathias, and I’m a CouchDB user. I’ve been using it for almost a year now, and we have a project using it in production, with a side of Redis. I think it’s an awesome database, some of its features are simply unrivaled. Offline replication, CouchApps, to name a few. CouchDB just hit version 1.0. It’s been a long time coming, with CouchDB having probably one of the longest histories in the non-relational database space. I’ve heard about it first back in September 2008, when Jan Lehnardt talked about it at a local co-working space. I still blame him for getting me all excited about this whole NoSQL thing. Fun fact: I bookmarked the CouchDB website back in February 2008.

Relational Data, Document Databases and Schema Design

By now it should be obvious that I’m quite fond of alternatives data stores (call them NoSQL if you must). I’ve given quite a few talks on the subjects recently, and had the honor of being a guest on the (German) heise Developer Podcast on NoSQL.

Vim - A Never-ending Love Story

About eighteen months ago I wrote about going back to Vim as my daily text editor. It was a bust, and I went back to TextMate after about a week.