I love my job, but sometimes I think I’d rather be a professional musician. Y’know?

Flickr Developer Blog

Flickr is hands down the best source of web development information I have ever had access to, starting with a fantastic tutorial session a few years back given by Cal Henderson. Their dev blog in particular strikes an inspirational balance between technical detail and pure wit.

Being a bachelor and freelancer means enjoying the occasional evening spent working. Now to crank up the Muse and clock in a few more hours…

History Repeating Itself

1993, meet 2009.

Some campaign trail promises, like middle-class tax cuts, may get left on the cutting room floor.

Why is my Rails app so slow on EC2?

If you’re on a small instance, then, congratulations! Your app is CPU bound. Bump that sucker up to a medium if you want to break 40 req/sec.

I spent the last few days bumping my head against this problem with an app that needed to support some seriously bursty traffic. We were running all the latest versions of Rails, Passenger, Ruby Enterprise Edition, and all that jazz on a fresh Ubuntu install with Apache 2. We tweaked the action, tweaked the Apache configs, tweaked about everything we could get our hands on. Many httperf and ab tests later, it still took us a while to be clued in on the real issue.

On the other hand, booting up a medium instance with the same AMI now gives us over 200 requests per second on the same action. Now that’s more like it!

Hopefully this post saves someone else a few hours of frustration ;-)

Too true. In my dream, I’m about to fail a Vector Analysis final. xkcd - A Webcomic - Students

[Via Recruiting & HR Humor: Give 100% at Work]

Startups in 13 Sentences

The best, most succinct advice I’ve yet seen on creating a startup, courtesy of Paul Graham. It all rings true in my (relatively limited) experience.