Recent content on Monkey Snatch Banana
This morning, I was reading a blog post from Joe Armstrong about how he got a Chandler like Triage system working in Tiddly-Wiki. A Triage system is one of the things I’d like to see GitHub add. That got me thinking, what are some of the other things I’d like to see in a GitHub. What follows is far from a complete listing of some things that readily jumped to mind.
Pony: How I learned to stop worrying and embrace an unproven technology Video of my QCon New York talk: “Pony- How I learned to stop worrying and embrace an unproven technology” is now available. The talk details my experiences thus far in using Pony at Wallaroo Labs to build Wallaroo, a high-performance stream processing system. The talk was part of a FinTech track so there’s a…
Scale Agnostic Python: How to scale your Python application without any code changes* Unfortunately, there is no video of this talk. I am, however, planning on putting a record together of the topic. Slides are available. A full half of the presentation was a code walkthrough and a demo of a bit of the power that you can get from using a scale agnostic platform. If you are interested in the topic,…
Why Pony? Bleeding edge technology for your concurrency woes Video of my Polyconf’17 talk “Why Pony? Bleeding edge technology for your concurrency woes” is now available. The slides are available here.
Building Confidence in a Distributed Stream Processor Video of my CodeMeshIO talk: “How Did I Get Here? Building Confidence in a Distributed Stream Processor” is now available. There’s a number of links at the end of the talk for additional material you can check out. To make life easier on everyone I’m recreating it here. Peter Alvaro Peter Alvaro’s twitter…
Building Confidence in a Distributed Stream Processor Video of my QCon New York talk: “How Did I Get Here? Building Confidence in a Distributed Stream Processor” is now available. There’s a number of links at the end of the talk for additional material you can check out. To make life easier on everyone I’m recreating it here. Peter Alvaro Peter Alvaro’s twitter…
This is a cautionary tale. One of youth and a lesson I eventually learned but still often don’t heed. About how sometimes, the tool that is easiest to get started with isn’t the tool that will make your job the easiest. When I was getting started as a professional programmer, I was devouring languages left and right, trying them out for a few days before moving on to others. From this, I…
I am a patient boy. I wait, I wait, I wait, I wait. My time is water down a drain Everybody’s moving. Everybody’s moving. Everything is moving, moving, moving, moving Please don’t leave me to remain. In the waiting room — Ian MacKaye How do you wait when you can’t wait? No, that isn’t a riddle; it’s a question I recently faced while writing some Pony code…
In this post, we are going to take a look at how Pony implements its TCP stack. The API for Pony’s networking stack is callback and event driven. I’ve previously written about network programming in Pony and showed how to implement a simple echo server. We didn’t, however, dive too deeply into the Pony TCP stack. In this post, we’ll move down a level of abstraction and see…
Lately I’ve been diving into learning Pony in a more organized fashion. As part of that, I’ve decided to share the experience along the way. If you aren’t familiar with Pony then you probably won’t get much from this post. If you are interested in a high performance, safe, actor based programming language, then I’d suggest you check out the Pony tutorial then venture…
Back in the salad days of the 1990’s, I was working at a company that was building the hot product of the day: an intranet. Every company wanted an intranet. We’d built several for different client before deciding to create a white labelable intranet that would be the delight of all our customers. Give us some money and we’d give you a themed intranet with calendaring, project…
Sometime in early 2013, I was really struggling with writing Storm Applied. I felt stymied at every turn by the requests of our editor. He was always asking us to explain simple topics more deeply. I almost lost my mind when a request to explain “web-scale” came up. It all felt like Manning was having us dumb the book down. Here we were trying to write an “advanced” book and we were running around…
Almost two years ago, I embarked on a project that I had no idea the immensity of. And today, it has finally led to this: It started with my bugging Matt Jankowski to write a “mea culpa” blog post about our problems getting going with Storm at TheLadders. The idea was to start with a “boy we didn’t know what we were doing” post and continue on with a series of posts…
Imagine for a moment that you are on a small development team tasked with core operations at a moderate sized startup. You’re responsible for the development, operations and maintenance of various production systems. Your day is filled with all the fun of programming combined with the joys of running a distributed system. You’ve just entered a room with the rest of your teammates to…
I recently did an interview with the news aggregator site lobste.rs. It covers some of what I’ve been up to in my role as Principal Architect at TheLadders, as well as some info about my forthcoming book Storm Applied.
Video of James and my talk at Smalltalk Solutions on where we are currently with Redline Smalltalk has been posted.
How Hard Could It Be? Not very hard; this little monkey who is more interested in bananas did it in no time flat. Setting up and running your own private Monticello repository is something almost any Smalltalker should be able to accomplish; as long as your aren’t completely command line and systems administration phobic, you should be done with my directions within half an hour. Installing…
Why FastCGI a.k.a Why Not Reverse Proxy? I’ve previously written about why I prefer reverse proxying to FastCGI. I still believe all those points, however there are certain Seaside deployment situations where FastCGI is currently preferable to reverse proxying. If you are deploying your Seaside application to run on Gemstone’s GLASS then you should give FastCGI serious consideration.…
Why Reverse Proxy a.k.a Why Not FastCGI? Transparency. FastCGI setups are opaque. You can’t easily test all aspects of it. Unless you write your own FastCGI client, debugging configuration problems can be very difficult. Lets imagine for a moment that are trying to debug a problem with your application– the issue might be in the front end server or it might be in the Seaside…
So, you are humming along developing your GLASS hosted Seaside application. If you are following the proscribed development path, your application is running in Pharo and you’ve started porting it to GLASS when a problem arises: Your application needs to make calls out to a secure web service (merchant processor etc) but, GLASS doesn’t have a native https client. The Pharo cryptography…
I’m currently employed as VP of Architecture at Wallaroo Labs. I’m a coauthor of Storm Applied. You can learn more about me (some of it is dated) from an interview I did with the website lobste.rs. Elsewhere… Email GitHub LinkedIn Twitter