rcrowley

Nebula transits every EC2-to-EC2 packet at Slack, across lots of AWS regions and tens of thousands of hosts. It’s probably doing petabits of traffic per second. And it’s a safer, more expressive firewall than EC2 security groups.

So, yes, it works for personal use-cases but it works for truly gigantic applications, too.

The "Don’t Measure Everything (YAGNI)" paragraph is particularly true.

Betable's license number from the UK Gambling Commission http://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk is 000-023328-R-307313-003. We're audited (by GLI, incidentally) against their codes of practice.

We're audited multiple times a year. Our UK Gambling Commission license compels us to be audited against their codes of practice and additionally we have the correctness and security of our systems audited independently.

The comments suggesting Wash U's CS program has (too much of) an academic slant have a point but also miss it entirely. In my experience, the academic is certainly emphasized over the pragmatic (for example, lots of talk about algorithmic complexity but zero mention of testing or version-control). That isn't in-and-of itself a problem, it's just a mistake in the order-of-operations. I needed a lot of real experience to motivate the academic in me.

In college, you couldn't pay me to read cutting edge CS literature because I was sure the academics were never going to teach me anything practical. Fast-forward five years and I'm bored of what I was doing and interested in the same hard problems academics are. (Of course, I'm coming to worse but occasionally good-enough solutions.)

It'll be good for Saint Louis and Wash U to have an injection of that context earlier because it might motivate the academic side of CS early enough for students with a couple of years left to give more of a shit.

VPC is definitely more like real hardware than EC2 but I take that as evidence VPC is premature optimization rather than support for undertaking this sort of migration.

A+++ WOULD CONTEXT SWITCH AGAIN!

Many of these (most notably, the constructor stuff) could be summarized as "don't use Java."

Gotta drive dat blog traffic.

The mere existence of Loader, Manager, Handler, Factory, and the like classes/methods indicate a lack of expressive power in Java's constructors.

I think this is an instance of one of the hard problems in computer science: naming things.

When thinking about "-er" names to avoid, think about "Executor" and its ilk. Contrast that with this example and I see "APIHelper" and "ModelFetcher" that should probably just be called "MyBackgroundThread" or some such with methods for fetching models and making synchronous HTTP requests.

In other words, I think avoiding "-er" is a specialization of http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom....

I/O is always the problem.

EveryDNS was the best. I switched last week to Rackspace Cloud DNS which, as best I can tell, is free(ish).

The DNS manager is hidden away within Hosting -> Cloud Servers -> (any random server) but accepts arbitrary records. No promises here that the records live on when you delete your last Rackspace Cloud instance.

Kudos to CloudFlare for offering export tools despite obstacles.

Is anyone else shocked to see Microsoft doing something horribly backwards-incompatible AND standards compliant all at once?

Cool story, bro. You saw Robert Scoble!

I'm the other founder of DevStructure. True story: I met Matt in the Slicehost IRC in 2007.

Note well: domain specific languages are not the same thing as Ruby APIs.

Mongo is by many measures worse than "a folder with clear text files."

Because Python 2.4 is still AWESOME!

Richard from DevStructure here. You're right about a lot of your criticism: the setup.sh process is not ideal. I do think it is preferable to pointing someone at packages.devstructure.com and saying, "Good luck!"

We'll be changing shortly to recommend `git clone` for first-time tinkerers and packages.devstructure.com for real use.

Because worse is better.