At first the developer said "this is where we're going to disagree on the simplest thing that could possibly work." He argued that we were backing ourselves into a corner by not following the pattern; therefore, what I was suggesting couldn't possibly work. I took a few moments to consider his point of view. I concluded that he might be right, but deleting 60% of the code we were currently working with meant that the remaining 40% was so small that if we did need to rewrite in the future it would actually be easier than the amount of effort required to maintain the prematurely put in place architecture.

Jay Fields is Sage.

Really, I promise I'm not that guy who drags his wife to the golf course every weekend. But I might turn into that guy because today I played without her, like a mere mortal. Or maybe it was that I opted to walk 18 holes in the heat.

So now I have three new golf rules:

• No more walking 18 holes in June, July or August
• That's no drainage ditch, its a sewage ditch
• Stop thinking

So there you go. My semi-annual post about golf!

In the short run, neither demand for nor supply of oil is very elastic. It takes time for people to replace their old guzzlers with more fuel-efficient cars, or to switch to jobs with shorter commutes, or to move closer to public transport. By the same token, it can take ten years or more to develop an oilfield after its discovery—and that does not include the time firms need to bolster their exploration units.

In short, nothing related to oil consumption changes quickly. It takes a decade for consumers to fully adjust to prices and the same amount of time for producers to field new technology and start mining new discoveries.

In the mean time, this little scooter is looking better and better!

Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations…

Since my run in with Bachelor of Science-grade Physics, I've considered myself someone who sucks at science. However, I suppose by Brian Greene's definition, I am a consummate scientist. I really enjoy diving into a deep subject (economics, linguistics, etc.) and trying to figure out what makes it tick. Its a fun way to go about life.

At the root of this pedagogical approach is a firm belief in the vertical nature of science: you must master A before moving on to B. When A happened a few hundred years ago, it’s a long climb to the modern era. Certainly, when it comes to teaching the technicalities — solving this equation, balancing that reaction, grasping the discrete parts of the cell — the verticality of science is unassailable.

A hearty "Amen!" here. So many topics seem intimidating to the neophyte. "You can't do this until you've learned this, that and the other." Stacked knowledge as barrier to entry is a total bummer.

I think something immersive is more rewarding. They say the best way to learn a foreign language is to surround yourself in it. I think this is true of any endeavor that, at some level, rewires your brain.

And… you said “relational”? Facebook and others do a lot of denormalization, they don’t ever use JOIN, they’d rather do several consequent requests and build intermediate results on a webserver (when you have 20 times more webservers than DBs it’s obviously good to move some load there). They treat good old MySQL as object storage with very fast B+ tree indexes. Finally, the resulting database is not a relational one. One thousand of MySQLs is just a distributed object storage with simple fast indexes and a bunch of hand-written code in php/ruby/python/whatever around it.

I've come upon this sort of idea several time recently (and the above was written a couple months ago). I'm warming up to the idea. Without piles of cash and able systems-type folks, scaling databases out is a really nasty problem. Even then, my reading is there are definite bounds for how far you can go.

Assembling datasets on the more easily scaled app server is appealing. It sounds fun (hey, real programming!) and is interesting to think about. But I wonder if it leads to having to figure out consistency in your application. From where I sit, its the hardest part of ACID to reason with.

Back when I worked in a semi-.NET shop, we needed to cache some pretty expensive operations somewhere. In memory would have been ideal, but we had no way to coordinate between application servers. It ended up going in the database, because that made everyone feel safe. In hindsight, it probably wasn't the greatest idea.

Long story short, my internal clock that tells me how long it will take Microsoft to clone a forehead-slappingly-obvious-idea is well set.

module Rails
  def self.env
    o = Class.new do
      def production?
        true
      end
    end
    o.new
  end
end

Evil and fun. Uses `Class.new`, my favorite Ruby method.

Muahahaha.

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Its on the things that aren't normally covered in books and websites programmers read. The things that you really need to know if you're going to achieve truly awesome developer status.

Obviously I think they're really important topics. Digging into them has really helped me as a software developer. I hope its helpful to you too.

Thanks to everyone who caught me afterwards or emailed to say they enjoyed the talk. And of course, if you enjoyed those videos, kudos to you as well!

• I'll join my FiveRuns compatriots (and the epic Rich Kilmer) for Two Apps, Four Daemons and a Gazillion Clients, a panel on The Big Rewrite of FiveRuns Manage. Join us at 11:45 AM on Friday.
• There's a book signing for all the contributors to Advanced Rails Recipes Friday at 12:35 PM in the Powell's booth. Come meet me and the other folks who brought you the latest in Rails recipes.
• I'm interviewing the inimitable Geoffrey Grossenbach on Saturday at 3:40 PM in the Heroku booth. Stop by to enjoy the hijinks!
• Rounding everything off, my presentation, Oh, The Fail I've Known is at 11:45 AM on Sunday. Come learn from my considerable past mistakes.

That rounds out the conference activities. But I'd be remiss if I didn't inform you that FiveRuns would like to buy you a drink or two Friday night at Jimmy Maks from 6 to 8 PM. Please to be joining me there!

What I am perhaps most excited about is the RailsEnvy videos that will premiere this weekend. You see, Jason and Gregg were kind enough to invite me to join them in making the funnies this year. Making them was a blast! I've seen the finished product and, in my completely biased opinion, I think you're going to like it.

Of course, I'd love to chat with you (yes, you) at any point in the conference. So if you see me (and I will probably stand out), come say "Hi!" I'm hoping to have something interesting for those that do...