<![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, ruby on rails]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gawker.com.png <![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, ruby on rails]]> http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/rubyonrails http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/rubyonrails <![CDATA[Yes, ex-Twitter architect Blaine Cook knows what scalability means]]> BlaineCook.jpgBefore he left, former Twitter architect Blaine Cook's job was to assure the service's scalability," or the ability to expand to meet growing user demand. Didn't happen. Instead, Twitter leads all social networks in downtime so far this year. In a post to his blog today, Cook wants to make one thing very clear: He knows what scalability is, OK? If one eliminates database chokepoints and throws enough servers at the problem, even crappy code written in Ruby on Rails will work. Cook just couldn't make it happen for Twitter. Here's the 100-word version:

Languages don't scale, architectures do. Some languages are faster than others — a given operation costs less. Faster means cheaper, it doesn't mean more scalable. Perl used to be slow. Now it beats JoCaml with the bestest concurrency. What was Perl built for? Parsing text. Does it mean that you can't build Wide Finder with another language? Does it mean that you couldn't build Wide Finder to scale out to a trillion documents with gawk? If you answered "yes", go back to the start of this post and read again! :-) If you're still answering "yes," try reading some more.
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=389632&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Valley hotties: David Hansson]]> the-hottest-hacker.jpgAlways one to sex up the tech world, Wired names David Hansson "the hottest hacker on earth." The creator of Ruby on Rails (a damn sexy app in itself) is featured in a one-off photo and blurb, opened in the proper Conde Nast way, fully contextualizing his contributions to technology and web design:

David Heinemeier Hansson could be mistaken for a Gap model. The Danish 26-year-old's blog is filled with glam photos of himself, his friends at parties, and his hot girlfriend.

The girlfriend's going to love that.

Rails plus 37signals in Wired and BusinessWeek [Loud Thinking by David Hansson]
The Hottest Hacker on Earth [Wired]

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