How Not To Design An API

I’ve had the dubious pleasure of working with a certain library. It’s a layer to talk to most of the Amazon Web Services APIs. While working with web services usually is a particular awful experience, this library doesn’t make much of an effort to hide their awkwardness, in fact, in some ways it even makes it worse. It’s pretty old news that I enjoy bitching about code I don’t like, but I also like to keep it positive in at least thinking about how it could be improved.

The NoSQL Dilemma (with a Happy Ending)

Call it NoSQL, call it post-relational, call it what you like, but it’s hard to ignore that hings are happening in the database world. A paradigm shift is not too far ahead, and it’s a big one, and I for one am welcoming our post-relational overlords. Whatever you call them, CouchDB, MongoDB (although you really shouldn’t call a database MongoDB), Cassandra, Redis, Tokyo Cabinet, etc. I’m well aware that they’re not necessarily all the same, but they do try to fill similar gaps. Making data storage easy as pie, offering data storage fitting with the kind of evolving data we usually find on the web.

Daily AWS Wtf and German Rails Conference

I’ve started a new blog (don’t worry, I have not abandoned this one), specifically targeting experiences, wtf’s and workarounds for the latter on Amazon’s Web Services. I’ve been working quite a lot with them recently, and there’s heaps of dark corners around, and things you need to be aware of. That’s what that blog is about. Head on over to Daily AWS Wtf and give it a read. It’s powered by the people of Peritor, so there’ll be other people writing too.

Ruby 1.9 Tidbits

Things that don’t really justify their own separate posts.