Most interesting links of Mars ’12

Recommended Readings ThoughtWorks Technology Radar 3/2012 – including apps with embedded servlet containers (assess), health check pages for webapp monitoring, testing at the appropriate level (adopt), JavaScript micro-framewors (trial, see Microjs.com), Gradle over Maven (e.g. thanks to flexibility), OpenSocial for data & content sharing between (enterprise) apps (assess), Clojure (before in asses) and CoffeeScript on

Note To Self: What to Do When a Vagrant Machine Stops Working (Destroy or Up Failing)

Sometimes “vagrant destroy” fails with an exception from the depths of the virtualbox Ruby gem or vagrant up freezes for a long time only to fail with SSH connection failure message. Here are some tips how to solve such problems. See also my Vagrant Notes.

Kent Beck: Best Practices for Software Design with Low Feature Latency and High Throughput

I was fortunate to attend Kent Beck’s lecture summarizing his experiences and thoughts regarding efficient software design. Traditionally there have been two schools of thought about design: Predictive design, trying to design everything upfront (and making lot of wrong decisions) and reactive design, where any design is only done if it is absolutely necessary for

Link: Benchmark and Scaling of Amazon RDS (MySQL)

Performance and scaling of the Amazon-managed MySQL, Relational Data Store (RDS): Scaling options: Horizontal scaling Sharding (distribute data [tables or rows] among multiple RDS instances; Tumblr uses sharded MySQL and it worked well for them) – there is no explicit support so the applications have to handle it themselves, i.e. know which table/rows to read from