- “You’re Doing It Wrong” by Poul-Henning Kamp in ACM Queue is worth a read if you’re writing any performance-critical code. By the same author, the Notes from the Architect for the Varnish cache is interesting for much the same reason.
- I recently re-found “Have you ever legalized marijuana?” by Steve Yegge. It’s a blog post (essay?) on complexity that anyone who hands work to programmers should read. At the very least it might explain why you hear the word “No” more often than you’d like. It’s a pity Steve doesn’t blog anymore, but at least all of his old stuff is still available.
- For anyone working on or interested in software used by large numbers of people, High Scalability is worth a visit. In particular, the Real Life Architectures section is worth reading through.
- Finally, in work-related news, Ross and I recently finished up a long, slow process of cleaning up the boards.ie infrastructure. Our next big challenge is to squeeze some more performance out of the software boards.ie runs on (vBulletin). If anyone out there runs a large vBulletin installation, we’d love to chat.