October 2011
7 posts
3 tags
time_helper
Last week I had to write some code that manipulates dates (yet again). It’s something we do often at Burt for various reasons.
[[MORE]]Since we normally work with timestamps we map almost every unit to the number of seconds it represents so there will be code like
MINUTE = 60
HOUR = 60 * MINUTE
When coding Rails, ActiveSupport gives you some really nice helper methods allowing you to write...
4 tags
Mikka Scheduling
We’ve added support for Actor scheduling in Mikka. This means you can now easily schedule a message to be sent to an Actor at a set time either once or continuously.
Imagine you want to print some status once every 1 minute. An acceptable way to to this would be using a Timer object or a Thread with sleep.
[[MORE]]But since we’re working with Actors and Akka has a Scheduler actor...
3 tags
Doing it simultaneously.
Making it big means making it scalable. And making it scalable means making it so that many independent processes can share the load. Coordinating these processes and making sure they’re not stepping on each others toes while maintaining full speed ahead is one of the leading causes of Tourette’s within the software developer community [1]. Then again…
[[MORE]]Doing things one at a time sucks....
3 tags
The twelve.
Scalable things come in dozens. If you ever find yourself coding something that you think you might want a whole bunch of, make it a multiple of 12. The reason is that sooner or later you’re gonna wanna split your code on multiple machines and nothing splits quite as well as a dozen.
If it’s true that in science, there are really only three numbers, 0, 1 and infinite [1], and in computer science...
5 tags
Mikka Remoting
Yesterday, Theo (@iconara) released an update to Mikka (http://github.com/iconara/mikka) enabling support for remote actors.
If you haven’t heard of Mikka, it’s a JRuby wrapper to Akka and if you haven’t heard of Akka (http://akka.io), it’s an Actors implementation written in Scala. We primarily code in JRuby so Theo created Mikka.
[[MORE]]To begin with, Mikka makes...
4 tags
Jakob's talk at the european JS-conf
While we’re at it, here’s Jakob’s slides from JS-conf.eu 2011 in Berlin.
The presentation was about some ideas for a better JavaScript - or rather, ideas for a more DSL-friendly language in general. Video TBA.
