At a tech job I had many years ago, the mailroom and to-desk mail delivery was done by a teenage girl who suffered from some intellectual disabilities of types I never felt the need to ask about. She had the mind and the attitude of a young child, she was always happy to say hello while dropping off and picking up packages and envelopes from ( Read more... )

I was working on a highly constrained consumer electronics device, a little "satellite device" that spoke to the main device over a CATV RF coax cable and also received commands from an IR remote control. My code was failing in bizarre ways. I adopted an extremely paranoid defensive programming stance, filling my code with asserts and doing ( Read more... )

Six months ago, right around the O'Reilly MySQL Conference, my previous employer, Gear6, suffered from "unfortunate cash flow event". That is, they ran out of money faster than their sales grew. Which is too bad, it was a good company with good and useful products, and it was staffed with good people. I appreciate the honest and ethical dealings ( Read more... )

Dear recruiters ( Read more... )

Once someone starts using memcached, they tend to quickly find themselves in the state of: "my database servers overload and my site goes down if the memcached stops working". This isn't really surprising, quite often memcached was thrown into the stack because the database servers are melting under the load of the growing site ( Read more... )

Last year, when I was doing MySQL Professional Services, I encountered a client that was already using memcached. Something they said they were doing was they were caching the compiled bytecode of their PHP code in their memcached, which was a big win because they ran a large fleet of identical PHP based application servers. As soon as any one ( Read more... )

When I first started working with Gear6, I pushed for bundling a version of our memcache appliance as an AWS EC2 AMI. We had already done much of the work by making a version available as trial as a VM image and our current effort on a "Universal Distro", which can run on any qualified piece of server hardware ( Read more... )

I've been involved with the Drizzle project since very soon after it began, working on it on nights and weekends ( Read more... )

Last November, I became an employee of MySQL Inc, which was owned by MySQB AB ( Read more... )

I've learned that Sun bought MySQL ( Read more... )