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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 →

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 →

CoffeeScript supports a subset of pattern matching called destructuring assignment. Destructuring assignment uses patterns to extract out the parts of an object during assignment. It’s a simple and elegant technique but when overused can have unintended consequences on a codebase. … Continue reading →

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 →

In a typical agile project the test suite grows roughly twice as fast as the non-test code. As developers, our goal should be the minimum amount of test code that specifies the behavior of the app. This often leads to … Continue reading →