This one's just for the programmers/architects, and mainly for the experienced ones: Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Building Reactive Systems.

The more you're used to building traditional Tomcat-plus-RDBMS applications, the weirder you're going to find this, but it's well worth reading and absorbing. It describes a few of the assumptions ( Read more... )

[Mainly for the programmers, and this time mainly for folks who have to touch web browsers.]

I'm currently catching up on old articles I've bookmarked to read later (more links may come), and I just read through this marvelous discussion of Scala.js, the Scala-to-Javascript compiler. In it, Li Haoyi (one of the first serious users of Scala.js, and ( Read more... )

It's been a long time coming, but I'm finally beginning to grok pure FP. I'm in the process of rewriting SpaceCore (one of the most dead-central Actors in modern Querki) to make the guts of all the functions pure, pulling all the side-effects out to the edges. (Not out of any sense of righteous purity, but because I need these bloody things to be ( Read more... )

One of the interesting lessons of working on the Querki project has been to be suspicious of the phrase "user error". It's a commonly-enough heard term in programming -- dismissing a bug report on the grounds that the user just didn't read the documentation closely enough. It's often accompanied by just the *tiniest* bit of sneer (or sometimes, ( Read more... )

See the latest release notes on the Querki Development Journal for details, but suffice it to say, Querki now has its own Cassandra cluster, and we're going to be transitioning most of the application data over to that (from the existing MySQL database) in the next month or two.

It feels almost trendy, but we're finally joining the NoSQL Age...

Yesterday, I hit a gigantic tarball in my current Querki project. (I'm currently rewriting the underpinnings to be journal-based instead of conventionally relational, which should make the system *vastly* more reliable, and permit us to build powerful version control into it. Huge project, but the end result is going to be *sweet ( Read more... )

[For the programmers]

Just came across this lovely little article, from a former Java programmer reflecting on having spent 5 years in Scala instead. Highly recommended to any programmers who are curious about Scala but intimidated (especially Java programmers) -- this outlines some of the key advantages of the system, and debunks a bunch of the ( Read more... )

[For the programmers, who might want to follow these links]

God bless the Cats project -- thanks to their documentation of it, I finally grok the State monadOn the downside, this means that I'm quickly realizing all the places that I should have been using it all along. (Indeed, it's probably the right solution to one of Querki's nastier internal ( Read more... )

I'm continuing to think about ways I could contribute to the local tech-entrepreneur scene (which led to yesterday's question about basic programming principles). It occurs to me that it might be quite useful to give a talk on "The CEO and the Successful Software Project": what the CEO (especially for a startup) needs to know about managing an ( Read more... )

Another day, another networking event -- I'm slowly getting used to going to all these Boston Tech Meetups and such, to meet people, talk up Querki and start to understand how one gets an investment ( Read more... )