"216! Did you know databases let you bring back more than one row at a time nowadays?"

Yes. The project is in Django (and built on top of Pinax), so it's the ORM making all those queries, not me. It's one of those social network site pages that aggregates activity from everyone you follow. It also shows details about them, how far they are away from you and any comments on the item, so there's only so small I can make it while coloring inside the lines of the mapping system. I've already fallen back to raw SQL for one of the elements (there are a couple of places, and sure to be more in the future, where we return a list of the database ids of all your friends so we can use them as part of " AND id in (x, y, z)" queries. Doing that through Django resulted in one query to the database for every friend you have. Given this was causing a slowdown when I'm the only user of the site and I only have 3 friends (one is another tester and the other two are dogs I know, so it's kind of a "Bob" situation (specifically the dog part and not the rest)), I had a suspicion that wasn't going to scale. Modified that, added some caching, got smarter about some lookups (I thought I'd only hit the db once no matter how many times I referred to a model's property in a function) and things are back to running smoothly.

"216!"

Hey, it was 1066 when I started a day ago. Or something close to that. I've got 1066 on the brain because I've been thinking about William of Orange and before you say--

"Write code for a job and think about William of Orange in your spare time. You must be a hit with the ladies."

--that, let me point out it was in reference to a Dutch Oven joke. That has to count for something.

"Undoubtedly. Perhaps 'lady killer' is more literal than figurative in your case."

Regardless, given the nature of the screen, aggregating a dozen types of activities from an arbitrary number of users, I don't think the current solution is the long-term answer, so I buttoned it up as best I could.

"As best you could? Implement the long-term solution now."

That would be solving a problem I don't have (c.f., "premature optimization", "YAGNI"). Given the data for this screen is derived from other objects in the system anyway, I think the long-term solution is to move this data into a nosql store (here's an example of using CouchDB in Django now and future updates to Django should improve support for this kind of thing). It's important to remember traffic issues fall under the title Good Problems to Have. While I'd love to spend a couple of days implementing this rightnowyespleasecani, if the overall project never takes off, it would be unfair to ask the client to pay for something they didn't ask for and never needed.

"216!"

I'm already obsessing over it on my own. Why do you think you're here?

1. Blogs I trust
2. Personal blogs
3. Development sites (e.g., 4guysfromrolla.com, etc.)
4. Mailing lists and newsgroups¹
5. Forums
6. Expert Sexchange

Regardless of where it comes from, there's no way to know if it's right. It's human nature to use the first thing that works (if under deadline, even the first thing that kinda works will do). As Jeff Atwood has pointed out (twice) , the danger is you might be copying off the paper of someone dumber than you². Because of this, I'd like to propose a microformat (assuming one doesn't already exist, given I didn't bother to check with Larry and Sergei) to indicate an author's experience with a language.

Immediate disclaimer: I realize this is a programming solution to a human nature problem and those never work, but bear with me, because my hope isn't to fix the problem, but to provide some metadata that will let machines do the work for us so we can stay lazy. Given that is in line with Newton's First Law, this will obviously be a huge success.

The format doesn't need to be very complicated. In fact, I'd prefer if it just provided a few bits of raw data that could be remixed by search engines however they see best. The data provided would stay the same but the algorithms could be tweaked for better results (though that would require feedback), providing an incentive for search engines to consume the format. Make the data something rough, broad and quick to fill out, like years of experience with the language and a simple measure of number of lines written (e.g., none, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, a whole bunch). There are any number of issues with using Lines of Code (LoC) as a metric (mainly that an idiot can say in 1,000 lines what a smarter person can say in 10), but if the ranges are broad enough, it should dampen the effect.

Bolt this format onto syntax highlighting engines; this blog, for example, uses WP-Syntax to format the few, poor code samples I provide— one more panel in the plugin admin that allowed me to store a hash of [language name, years, lines of code] would allow the plugin to provide that information in any page using the languages and output a visible box on the page so inexperienced users who come to the page and see my code could know it was terrible without knowing it was terrible. Add it into the syntax formatters for popular forum software (and allow users to specify their experience) and every code argument in a forum post becomes a little easier to follow.

The format doesn't tell you if a snippet is correct, it just gives you some background information (assuming the author is honest in their self-reporting). The danger would be users trusting a snippet blindly because the author has 10 (bad) years of experience (a sort of "Appeal to authority") while better code from "newer" users goes ignored. That's a human nature problem and obviously you can't solve those with programming (/broad wink).

1. I'd rank these higher, especially official groups for languages and systems except for two reasons:

2. Basically unrelated story that I've crammed in because I always tell it because it cracks me up: in high school, we had to go to the local public high to take the SATs. The person sitting next to me scribbled furiously throughout the test and was always the first one finished (which frustrated me to no end). When we were walking out, he turned to us and said, "Dude, I just made pretty pictures with the bubbles."

1. The different singers do not have to sing different parts
2. The multiple scores are based solely on having multiple microphones

In this case, 1 + 2 equals, "If you stick three microphones in front of your face and start wailing, you'll be credited as three singers, including the double and triple bonuses". Kids, you're only cheating yourselves.

1. Pinax's settings.py file does not provide a setting for AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS, so the test client's login method doesn't know how to log your user in. Specify "AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = ('django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend',)" in your settings file. Actually, I lied. That's the default value for the setting; having gone back and re-run my tests without it specified, everything works, which means the only idiot here is the guy who . . .
2. Don't create users by specifying the password directly in the declaration (e.g., user = User(username='Dummy', password='goodluck')). Use the set_password() User method to properly set the password.

I've run into a fair number of issues working in Django where Google wasn't helpful. I think 90% of those issues were because no one else was dumb enough to make such an obvious mistake. The other 10% were typos.

It wasn't until about year 3 of the Don Orsillo Experience that I realized I'd seriously undervalued Sean McDonough. Orsillo is fine, but he's a generic Connecticut School of Broadcasting voice. Close your eyes and he could be talking about the Kansas City Royals. Sean McDonough's only sin for me (beyond the too-goofy adulation of Remy) was not being Ned Martin. Hearing Monty makes me feel like I'm ten, I've got a whole summer in front of me and there's nothing to worry about for the foreseeable future*. And that shit will get you killed.

* Of course, there were no World Series wins back then either

Except in one case: if a label wanted to set up a "city" that contained historic venues a group played at on their rise to stardom and require you to buy various tracks to use them, that seems like a really cool way for labels to increase artists' sales in Rock Band (or Guitar Hero). It'd be like a low-cost version of Rock Band: Beatles for any group that cared to take the time/ money to get the venues created.

1. I am, of course, ignoring the legal issues that could arise from letting people create venues with names like "This place in my hometown sucks b@!!s", but it's my post and I'll do so if I want to.

 
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Like I said, not rocket science. It adds some CSS & JavaScript includes (which are remotely-hosted, so you don't even have to worry about media roots or how it works locally vs. live) and then a bit to add a class to the body tag for the YUI skin.

My name is Crew
My name is Crew
Saving kids is kinda what I do
[a capella]Leading them away from a path of self-destruction . . .

And so on. The ravens were a result of watching a David Attenborough documentary last night and Michelle points out "kinda what I do" is a phrase that Bill Burr repeated in the stand-up show we watched again last night. So that explains a bit of it, but I still don't get where these dreams with original music come from. I must be choking off my creative brain during waking hours. Earlier this week I'd dreamt my friend had walked into a convenience store and declaimed a filthy sonnet in perfect ABAB rhyme scheme explaining why he needed to buy the New York Times Sunday Magazine and not the whole paper.

1. Falls into what I would call the "Tetris Dream" category, when you've become a little too interested in something: had a dream where I was in a field hospital somewhere in the jungle watching a TV report, hosted by @leolaporte about Canadian Twitterers, whom he referred to as "C-itters". I'd really hoped we were beyond that kind of prejudice in 2009.
2. I was a amateur anti-mob sniper, recruited for the job by a rogue government agent who's ex-girlfriend I was dating (she was also recruited for the cause; for the record, I'm pretty sure it was this woman from Numb3rs). I was up in our hotel room[1] with my assignment in my sights when I noticed the Mob's snipers hanging out of the hotel window right next to me. Jumping back out of the window, I went to inventory the guns and ammunition I'd been left when the treachery became clear: the case had almost no bullets (but plenty AA batteries, the guns being electric). To heighten the stress of the moment, the cleaning crew started coming around the halls.
3. To cap the evening, I got another go at my newest recurring dream. Since my Mom died, I've been having this strange cartographic dream where I try to map out the city of Newport[2] from a boat. It never works, the boat sinks and whatever I'm looking for goes unfound. I could probably save this dream-self a lot of time if he'd give me a whack at his map.

[1] We'd gotten to the point in our relationship where we were not only comfortable sharing a hotel room, we could interrupt a vacation to gun down mobsters without any negative effect on our relationship
[2] More accurately, the whole of Aquidneck Island, as I think last time I wound up in Portsmouth under the Mount Hope Bridge.