Posts tagged: WRITING

I can be kind of a stickler about leveraging the ticket/issue tracker in software projects (which always seems to be Jira these days, but nevermind that). I write tickets carefully; I link to related issues; I add comments to note the status of work in progress, or to record info that’s important to the work to be done.

(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 Naturally, other details may be out of date as well.)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?

A little-known bit of trivia about our book, Python Web Development with Django: we wrote the manuscript in Markdown.

I think it was my idea. One of the major motivations for using a text-based format – versus the unfortunate de facto standard, Microsoft Word – was integration with good developer tools and workflow.

Our manuscript and all our project code was in a Subversion repo, so each author always had the latest updates. HTML generated from the Markdown files was great for generating nice printed/printable output too.

This began as a quick reply to a discussion on the Well about a recent posting from John Gruber which links to a hit list from Crackberry.com about the iPhone. Gruber focuses just on the keyboard issue, about which I found I had this to say:

With the built-in spelling correction, I can type close to 30wpm on my iPt keyboard. This is faster than I ever was with Graffiti, which I used for about 8 years and was pretty good at if I say so. Most of the stuff I do with the device doesn’t involve the keyboard, and then I’m really happy not to have a hard keyboard.