Mike Perham

Configuration for Rails, the Right Way

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Mike Perham

I still see people promoting various gems and plugins to handle miscellaneous configuration elements for your application. One little known secret is that Rails 3 allows you to define your own configuration elements trivially. In this case, I wanted to … Continue reading →

Posted in Everything Else | 27 Comments

Up and Running with Clojure

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Mike Perham

For the last three years or so, Clojure has been a language that I admired from afar: the design of the language is wonderful but I’ve never really used it to build anything and haven’t looked closely at the language … Continue reading →

Posted in Web | 16 Comments

A Modern Guide to Threads

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Mike Perham

I spoke recently at Rubyconf 2011 on some advanced topics in threading. What surprised me was how little experience people had with threads so I decided to write this post to give people a little more background on threads. Matz … Continue reading →

Posted in Web | 11 Comments

Improving Resque’s memory efficiency

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Mike Perham

Resque is a very popular message queueing system for Rails applications.  Here’s how I recently improved the memory efficiency of a Carbon Five customer’s resque processing farm by 68x! The Problem This customer has an existing investment in Resque and … Continue reading →

Posted in Web | 8 Comments

Think Globally, Stage Locally

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Mike Perham

Or: how to create and deploy to a staging environment running locally! Staging: an environment that duplicates production as closely as possible to find any lingering bugs before you update production. Most of the Rails community develops on OSX but … Continue reading →

Posted in Ops | 2 Comments

Asynchronous Processing with girl_friday

Posted on April 20, 2011 by Mike Perham

I want to introduce you to my new gem, girl_friday. The problem: current asynchronous processing tools with Ruby are too inefficient and too complex. Efficiency It’s sad to admit but commonly with Ruby if you want to process 5 messages … Continue reading →

Posted in Web | 15 Comments

Concurrency with Actors

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Mike Perham

Programming concurrent code with threads and shared state is hard to get right.  Actors are an attempt to build a safer concurrency model for application developers to use.  Erlang uses the actor model as the basis for its concurrency and … Continue reading →

Posted in Web | 7 Comments

Node.js, Part III: Full Stack Application

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Mike Perham

In my previous posts, I introduced you to Node.js and walked through a bit of its codebase. Now I want to get a simple, but non-trivial Node.js application running. My biggest problem with Node.js so far has been the lack … Continue reading →

Posted in Web | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Node.js, Part II: Spelunking in the Code

Posted on March 14, 2011 by Mike Perham

In my last post, I gave a quick overview of Node.js and showed you how to install and smoke test it. Now let’s dive deeper and learn what it provides and how it works.

Posted in Web | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Node.js Overview

Posted on March 9, 2011 by Mike Perham

I was a Java guy for 10 years and I’ve been a Rubyist for the last 5 years. Over the years, I’ve tried to develop expertise in a particular area of technology that will both pay the bills and make … Continue reading →

Posted in Web | Tagged , | 3 Comments