noSQL is a big tent with lots of interesting tech in it. A few years ago at work I got an assignment to evaluate graph databases as a possible datastore for our 40-million-pageviews-a-day CMS. Graph DBs are elegant stuff, though not a particularly special fit for that application. Here’s what I had to say.

Graph databases are all about “highly connected” data. But instead of tracking relationships through foreign-key mappings RDBMS style, they use pointers that directly connect the related records.

(I recently posted this on Quora in response to a question along the lines of “Engineers, when did you decide to study Computer Science?”)

I have been a full-time software engineer for the last 7 years, and a part-time one for ten years before that.

I have never formally studied computer science.

It wasn’t an option before college (small high school in rural Vermont). And at the otherwise excellent small liberal arts college I attended, it wasn’t one of the available majors.

(Note: This is a writeup I did a few years ago when evaluating Riak KV as a possible data store for a high-traffic CMS. At the time, the product was called simply “Riak”. Naturally, other details may be out of date as well.)

Riak is a distributed, key/value store written in Erlang. It is open source but supported by a commercial company, Basho.

Its design is based on an Amazon creation called Dynamo, which is described in a 200-page paper published by Amazon. The engineers at Basho used this paper to guide the design of Riak.

I really do like Quora (you may have seen my SadQuora tweets, a side effect of the time I spend there). But when somebody asked, “What are the most annoying types of questions on Quora?” I couldn’t resist. Maybe it’s just my feed, but I see things like these a lot:

• I’m 23 years old, am I too old to learn programming?
• If a self-driving car had to either hit and kill a cow in the left lane, or hit and kill a horse in the right lane, which would it choose?
• I made this, do you like it?
• Who would win in a fight between seven adult tigers and a Humvee full of Navy SEALs?
• What is the best programming language to use if I want to make a site to compete with Facebook?
• What phone is best for graphic design?
• What is the process of building a jet airplane from scratch? Please be specific.
• Why do all my questions get marked as needing improvement?
• My computer is acting funny, how do I fix it?
• Is computer programming going to be obsolete in five years because all the computers will program themselves?
• My girlfriend said she didn’t want to see me anymore and moved to another country and married some other guy and changed her name. Would it be romantic to track her down?
• What is the cutest picture of your cat and what is a story about it?

When I first switched from OS X to Ubuntu for my daily development work, one of the things I missed a lot was Divvy.

“Window throwing” is the purpose of Divvy (and Spectacle, which I later replaced it with). With a single keyboard shortcut, I can make the foreground window fill the right half of the screen. Or the left half. Or the bottom right quadrant. Or the whole screen. Any rectangle I care to define. I can even send it to the other monitor.

Non-engineers want to know: what happens when a big bug is found in your software, and the bug is causing real users real problems, and you’re the one who wrote the code?

Engineers do sometimes write bad code, and sometimes it makes it into production, it’s true.

But shipping production software involves a lot more than writing code. It goes beyond that one engineer. That engineer is not the only person who saw or ran that code.

When we were growing our team of Python devs at CMG, I was involved in a lot of interviews. I really enjoyed it, meeting and hiring interesting and talented engineers.

I’m not a big fan of quizzing people on technical minutiae in interviews. I do think that asking some questions about technical likes and dislikes can be very illuminating though.

For example, “What’s your favorite standard library module?” (My favorite answers are itertools or functools, but anything that shows they have hands-on appreciation for the depth of the standard library is good.)