I've been playing with Docker a little bit; as you know its the hype of the moment, and is getting some traction. Its one of this projects I would like to see surviving its hype, because the concepts behind it are really good. Is AnotherWayOfSeeingThings(tm); you containerize EVERYTHING on your stack, with the benefit that you can very easily distribute your application in different hosts without almost any extra overhead. It reminds me to the Erlang programming language, where all its processes (also called actors) can be spawned ...

You may or may not know that all the Linux operating systems will switch to systemd as init system.

When I saw the project at first it kinda broke the me schema of seeing things and I didn't really like the idea to switching to something new. Of course it was something completely irrational; first of all, a lot of distributions and people have been involved in the process of switching what will be the new standard of init system. The main players were systemd, SysVinit and upstart. After ...

This talk, given by Kevin, it's the best one I've seen so far and enjoyed the most. I strongy recommend you to see it, not just because Kevin is fun explaining things, but because it gives a lot of examples that must be seen and cannot be copyed to a blogpost.

Here is the link of the video and of the transcript

Kevin thinks that growth is a really easy concept to mesure, is the interaction of two concepts, conversion rate and churn; churn being the percentatge of ...

Install

The installation of MySQL is straighforward on debian-like systems. Just type:

sudo aptitude install mysql-server mysql-client -y

In the installation process you'll be asked to set up the password for the admin user. Remember this password because you'll need it in a moment. One thing, though, this username must NOT be used by your applications because it has ALL privileges possible, and you don't want your application to have the right to drop other databases installed in the same MySQL. Limited users must be created for ...

tl;dr Always use InnoDB

MyISAM is a MySQL storage engine. I remember my first days when using MySQL that I didn't know what to choose, if MyISAM or InnoDB. If you searched on forums and alike you probably found comparsions between the two storage engine talking about performance, consistency, transactions, etc... What they didn't tell you is that InnoDB for almost all the use cases is the right choice.

Some of the limitations of MyISAM is that it does not support foreign keys. The funny thing, though ...

Awesome chapter. Really enjoyed it. It talks about the tools you use on daily basis and how important they are. We are craftsman. The tools we use for developing must be an extension of our body; fully personalized/configured with the exact setup that works for you. We need to use tools for very different jobs, and they must be the very best options out there; and for the sake of productivity we must master them.

Plain text

Is a human friendly representation of knowledge, easy to manipulate, share, track ...

The second chapter of the book is about the Pragmatic Approach. Here is a small sumary of its points:

Duplication is bad

Really bad. Use the DRY principle. The duplication can come in diferent flavours:

IMPOSED DUPLICATION. It seems you have no choice; YOU HAVE. If you feel like you don't probably need a to review the design of your application. You can have multiple representations of the data like documentation:

Programmers are taught to comment their code: good code has lots of
comments. Unfortunately, they are never taught ...

Alex Schultz talks about the way he started doing SEO; at first is was dead easy to be on top of Altavista's first page; just by putting a footer in your page with a lot of words repeated it would do the trick.

Then Google and Page Rank appeared and you needed to have backlinks to your site. At that moment that mean a single link from Yahoo directory and DUMP! you were on the top result page. Then AdWorks appeared and the started buying adds of Google and ...

This lecture is given by Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and he is also an investor in a lot of companies in Sillicon Valley.

He thinks that you always want to aim for monopoly. Something unique and very difficult to replicate by your competitors. If you have a valuable bussiness two things are true.

Number one: your bussiness creates "X" dollars of value for the world.
Number two: you capture "Y" percent of "X".

Is important no note that "X" and "Y" are independant variables. So the concept of a ...

The Pragmatic Programmer is a book a friend of mine (LB) let me know about 4 years ago. He taught me almost everything I know about programming and he strongly recommend me to read the book, thing that I did. At that time, though, I didn't know almost anything about... nothing (as if I knew what I'm doing now ¬¬). I learned some ideas that I've been using since then, but at the time I didn't fully understand most of the concepts of the book. LB told ...