Bob's Nerd Shit

For years I’ve always known that B-Trees were used in databases, but until I snatched a copy of Principles of Database Systems (printed in 1982) I didn’t really understand how. The book breaks down how data is physically stored on a system and builds on that concept to illustrate how databases work. To keep things brief, records are basically their own data structure and indexes are systems of efficiently providing access to them, and what really struck me is in thinking about it that way that B-Trees really are not implicitly the best data structure for a Database. The tradeoffs really aren’t worth it unless you have large volumes of hierarchical data. So in saying that, I think we need to think more about our data and our application’s relationship with it when we’re designing software. Because it could very well be that an off-the-shelf database system wouldn’t be as performant as a hash-based system you rolled yourself.

But there’s more to this world and my career than the Facebooks and the Googles of the world, and as it would turn out, I am unlocking doors I didn’t think were un-lockable without one the aforementioned companies on my resume. Deciding whether or not to turn down said opportunities is terribly difficult, stressful, and not clear cut in the least. But ultimately, I think for the immediate time being, with the current economic situation, that the smart move for me is to stay put. There’s quite a lot I can learn at my current role that will help me better a candidate at those types of roles in the future.

Output from my TypeScript call-graph generator I wrote in Python and DotViz.

Developed in 1970 means 50 years of fixing bugs and handling edge cases. You try and re-write that thing and the end result will never be as feature complete or error free as what you've got now. If there’s a scalability issue, a more logical approach would be to figure out how to divide the work up among multiple machines. Age just shouldn’t be a factor in any decision to re-write an application.

My RedHat Systems Administrator study stack

A TypeScript call graph generator, Git change log generator, JavaScript SimTower clone,  Pokemon Card search engine, a website with 80k pages, Roland T-727 clone, and the LAN party box. "With your condition, I don't think you'll be able to keep up." Lol, wut?

So I took my current job because I wanted to learn more about object-oriented software developed without frameworks and the flexibility that goes along with it, and my biggest takeaway so far is that frameworks and software packages are just self-contained versions of the entire software development ecosystem. That often solve some problems well but also provide light versions of software that's better suited to being a standalone service: queueing systems, caches, job servers, etc. Basically here's what that means to me, you shouldn't use a framework or a software package like Salesforce or SAP if you want to develop software that stands the test of time. If you want software that will scale to handle hundreds of millions or billions of records, reads, writes, etc. and last 10-20+ years you need to delegate tasks to well-suited services, libraries, and have the flexibility to roll your own as is the case with sharding. Rather, I think frameworks work well for small, disposable applications and  software packages are best when used to customize an experience.

The problem with approach number 1 is that any hacker or modder could enable premium features on cheap hardware, and with approach 2 you’re spending an untold amount of dollars to design multiple bespoke applications. Which programmers are then going to have to learn. Though that’s not to say that the final approach is without its detractors. Component and service-oriented approaches do not come with a lot of features inside the box and development workflows are often difficult. But nevertheless I feel it’s important to explore what a component-based PHP solution would like and how you might tackle some of its pitfalls.

I made a browser game for Chrome using plain old vanilla JavaScript(no frameworks or libraries), CSS, and HTML. The gameplay(if you want to call it that) is loosely based off of city-building mechanics but done in the style of Sim Tower. You can play it here: http://w.alled.city/ and view the source-code here: https://github.com/Rkozik/kowloon-walled-city

Conventional wisdom says a site will be indexed by Google within 3-4 weeks, but what happens if your new site had 76,000 pages? Well, unless the rate increases I’m looking at 3.4 years.

PHP, in my opinion, has lost favor with the folks who make decisions (management) because of its operating costs. The language consumes a lot of CPU time so you need quite a few servers. Finding PHP developers who’re also linux developers is quite hard so you need developers and sys admins. It’s also a very unforgiving language if you write bad code. Which means more time fixing bugs and less time working on new features.

Scale Out Mysql by Partitioning