Simon Willison's Links

A quote from Brian Goetz

2011-08-19T12:20:10Z

There is plenty of evidence in the ecosystem to support the hypothesis that, if given the tools to do so easily, object-oriented programmers are ready to embrace functional techniques (such as immutability) and work them into an object-oriented view of the world, and will write better, less error-prone code as a result. Simply put, we believe the best thing we can do for Java developers is to give them a gentle push towards a more functional style of programming.

- Brian Goetz

How we use Redis at Bump

2011-07-16T16:37:17Z

How we use Redis at Bump. A couple of neat tricks I hadn’t seen before: using Redis to aggregate log files from multiple servers (they all push in to a Redis queue, then one process pulls from the queue and writes to disk), and using Redis blocking queues for RPC by specifying a different temporary queue to return the result.

A quote from Dan Manges, Braintree

2011-06-30T21:27:10Z

We can deploy new versions of our software, make database schema changes, or even rotate our primary database server, all without failing to respond to a single request. We can accomplish this because we gave ourselves the ability suspend our traffic, which gives us a window of a few seconds to make some changes before letting the requests through. To make this happen, we built a custom HTTP server and application dispatching infrastructure around Python’s Tornado and Redis.

- Dan Manges, Braintree

The New Heroku (Part 4 of 4): Erosion-resistance & Explicit Contracts

2011-06-29T17:26:36Z

The New Heroku (Part 4 of 4): Erosion-resistance & Explicit Contracts. I really like Adam’s description of Software Erosion—I’ve seen that happen to my projects a bunch of times, and it really is an important problem to solve.

Visualizing WebKit's hardware acceleration

2011-06-27T10:31:19Z

Visualizing WebKit’s hardware acceleration. Command line flags for launching Safari (and the iOS simulator) in a way that highlights areas of the screen that are being hardware accelerated—particularly useful if you are using the “-webkit-transform: translate3d(0,0,0)” trick.

On HTTP Load Testing

2011-05-18T10:17:14Z

On HTTP Load Testing. Mark Nottingham explains that running good HTTP benchmarks means understanding available network bandwidth, using dedicated physical hardware, testing at progressively higher loads and a whole lot more.

We Need to Stop Google's Exploitation of Open Communities

2011-04-22T10:00:04Z

We Need to Stop Google’s Exploitation of Open Communities. Mikel Maron from OpenStreetMap is justifiably angry about Google MapMaker, which copies OpenStreetMap’s model of crowdsourcing geographic data (even copying the OSM idea of Mapping Parties) but keeps the data under a much more restrictive license, and uses the Google brand to market itself to African governments.

Why Facebook open-sourced its datacenters

2011-04-09T07:54:31Z

Why Facebook open-sourced its datacenters. Jon Stokes speculates that Facebook plan to use open source hardware to compete with Google at datacenter efficiency . This isn’t a new pattern. Years ago when I worked at Yahoo! I was furiously jealous of the secret sauce technologies that allowed Google to build big applications faster than anyone else, such as BigTable and map/reduce. Today, the open source world has created better, free alternatives—sponsored in part by Facebook, Yahoo! and other Google competitors.

Qwery - The Tiny Selector Engine

2011-04-02T08:27:09Z

Qwery—The Tiny Selector Engine. A quarter of the size of Sizzle (1K gzipped and minified) due to only supporting ID, class and attribute selectors. Could be useful for things like embeddable widgets and badges, where depending on a larger library is impolite.

Product design at GitHub

2011-04-02T07:51:32Z

Product design at GitHub. At GitHub, every employee is a product designer.

YC Is Not a School for Startups - It Is Marine Corp Boot Camp for Startup Founders

2011-03-20T17:27:16Z

YC Is Not a School for Startups—It Is Marine Corp Boot Camp for Startup Founders. This is a great description of what it’s actually like to do YC. If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t blogged much over the past three months, this is why.

Your Web, Half a Second Sooner

2011-03-17T17:39:01Z

Your Web, Half a Second Sooner. Google AdSense now serves a tiny bit of JavaScript that loads everything else in a dynamically populated iframe, thus avoiding blocking the rest of the page load. It’s about time online advertising providers started taking page performance seriously.

DNS Prefetching Implications

2011-03-09T22:54:51Z

DNS Prefetching Implications. deviantart use a subdomain per user, which meant the DNS prefetching feature in Firefox and Chrome was costing them an extra 10 billion DNS queries per month. Disabling it with a meta tag saves them $1600/month in DNS service charges.

A quote from Maciej Ceglowski

2011-02-11T02:57:04Z

One interesting quirk of Pinboard is a complete absence of unit tests. I used to be a die-hard believer in testing, but in Pinboard tried a different approach, as an experiment. Instead of writng tests I try to be extremely careful in coding, and keep the code size small so I continue to understand it. I’ve found my defect rate to be pretty comparable to earlier projects that included extensive test suites and fixtures, but I am much more productive on Pinboard.

- Maciej Ceglowski

CSRF: Flash + 307 redirect = Game Over

2011-02-10T22:07:30Z

CSRF: Flash + 307 redirect = Game Over. Here’s the exploit that Django and Rails both just released fixes for. It’s actually a flaw in the Flash player. Flash isn’t meant to be able to make cross-domain HTTP requests with custom HTTP headers unless the crossdomain.xml file on the other domain allows them to, but it turns out a 307 redirect (like a 302, but allows POST data to be forwarded) confuses the Flash player in to not checking the crossdomain.xml on the host it is being redirect to.