Coding

Weekly review of what’s caught my eye

Here’s the first post of what will hopefully be a weekly roundup of things that interest me. It’s inspired by an attempt to blog more to achieve some mental clarity.

So, here’s what’s been on my mind this week, in loose order of importance:

Data Structures, nice ways to work with trees in SQL

I’ve been mentally wrangling with something that is coming up in Zazengo soon, finding a nice clean way to store a tree structure in a database and be able to traverse it to any depth in a fast and efficient manner.

I did a bit of research at first, and came up with a description of the adjacent list and nested set models on the MySQL site. The nested set concept was new to me, and very interesting. Wondering if there were any other options, I asked a question on StackOverflow, and got a few great responses (thanks everybody!!), but unfortunately nothing much too new, (though Daniel Beardsley’s suggestion to go with some denormalization is something I’m thinking about).

So if I’m to trust the StackOverflow community, which I’m doing more and more every day, I guess that’s telling me that these are the best options out there. Now to think about implementation. We have some unique needs that leave me wondering if the Nested Set woudl work for me (we’re not quite a standard tree). One thing I’ve seen is a rails plugin called Better Nested Set. My first gut feeling looking that up is that it seems relatively outdated, but sometime soon I’ll explore it more and let you know.

Ilya Grigorik - once again he beats me to it - on load testing from real usage data

Yet again, Ilya Grigorik scratched an itch of mine when he posted about load testing, and even put together some cool code to help out. How does he always hit the exact topic that’s been on my mind in a full and comprehensive posting, right as I’m thinking about it? Somehow we’re very in sync….but he’s just a bit ahead. One thing in the comments caught my eye, Pylot is another load testing tool that I’m going to test out a bit, see how it feels.

iPhone development, here I come!

Apple lifted the NDA on their SDK for the iPhone, (well kinda)! This means that finally some great blog postings and screencasts are coming out on how to build apps for the iPhone. Works well for me, I dove into a tiny bit of iPhone dev a couple weeks ago, and was looking for this kind of thing. Looks like now I’ve got a great way to get started with a bit more help!

StackOverflow.com, Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky

I came across StackOverflow via twitter some time recently, and from there have found myself listening to the podcast almost incessantly. Joel and Jeff are smart guys, and it’s been really fun to get an insight into their development and overall process in launching the site. Worth the listen for sure. I’m now all caught up with the recent episodes, and like it so much I’m going to go back and start at the beginning!!

Other miscellany:

• This is a nice way to simplify your ruby code, by grouping related elements of a large class definition into multiple files. The comments show that it’s a bit of a contentious approach, but it appeals to me, and I can think of more than a few places I could use it today.
• I commented over here on this posting about using association extensions in rails. Haven’t heard any replies to it, anybody?
• Named scopes just keep getting better. I found some pretty interesting usage examples of it in a search context - worth further exploration for sure.
• This is old news now I’m sure, but hey, this is my first in this blog series, right! Yay, there are now mailer layouts in Rails.
• Veronica Belmont twittered that Buzzfeed.com is worth checking out. I signed up and immediately didn’t know what to do. They need an “About Us” page, I don’t have time to figure it out!
• Marcel Molina on twitter says Readernaut.com is also worth looking at. I took a quick look, and my gut feeling was….maybe. I don’t know if it’s because I’m working too much, or have a new baby, but organizing my reading habits isn’t something I need right now.