Review of one of the books that I enjoyed recently a lot about Hadoop MapReduce framework and distributed systems in general.
There is a time in every man's life when he gets involved with big data. It recently happened to me not only in my pet projects but in a real life scenario and suddenly your computer and network is not enough and everything is slow again. An obvious choice for storing data is S3 on AWS but even here you have to be smart to be able to move data around. I have written a small snippet of code to move data between buckets efficiently.
Trees are interesting structures and lots of fun and despair can arise from them. Recently I had a chance to work on an interesting problem at my day job at [GoodData](http://gooddata.com) so I wrote down some notes for others.
In a recent article I have discussed several options for expressing hierarchies. Though it discussed the problem in context of GoodData BI platform it actually did not show you how to do that exactly. Now it is time to roll up our sleeves and try to hack it together.
Recently I have been posed a task in our company to think about redesigning our invitation and registration infrastructure to enable incorporation of new use cases. Since I have got my feet wet with Sproutcore, I am now seeing patterns and problems on client, I used to thought are server side only. Since I used to to do stuff with Rails, I decided to steal something from them and hack it quickly in JavaScript. Our company uses primarily YUI 3 now, so this is meant to work right in the YUI environment, though it probably will be not much hassle to port it to any library out there.
Recently I have seen some confusion about DataStore and granularity of its usage in Sproutcore google group. Since I have been playing with this lately and usually to tidy things up in my head, it is best to put thoughts on paper, here is my take on the usage of DataSources.
During spending a lots of time with YUI3, I felt like it is a great set of tools and abstractions, but it is still too rough and low level for real application development. YAHOO gave me the hammer and nails, but never told me, how to build a house. Sproutcore on the other hand is much more mature in this regard and IMHO solves a lots of problems, I have encountered in current web application development. I have been playing with it a little lately, so let's have a look, how NodeJS and Sproutcore, two latest and greatest in client and server side development, are playing together.
As in all companies, we need to build stuff. Recently I got involved with our client side building process and found out, that it is written in PHP (which is not bad), but custom (which often is). Since we needed to introduce serious slew of new tasks, we started looking for alternative, which would provide us with infrastructure and features, our system didn't. Since I used rake before a little bit, I finally got incentive to get my feet fully wet. This is what I found out.