An excellent article on Unicode: Emoji under the hood.
Category Archives: Design
Charts.css
Kickass: Charts.css. Also of interest: Which color scale to use when visualizing data.
Preemptive Pluralization is (Probably) Not Evil
An interesting article on data modelling and API design: Preemptive Pluralization is (Probably) Not Evil.
Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit
While flipping through Cassandra: The Definitive Guide I discovered Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit.
Coding Constructs Daniel Markham Now Avoids
Understanding Kerberos
Today on r/programming: Understanding how Kerberos works, but also WHY it works the way it does. (PDF)
Resilience Engineering: Part I
Found this one today: Resilience Engineering: Part I via www.whoownsmyavailability.com. The resilience engineering article is about… resilience engineering.
Database Normalization
A light intro to Database Normalization. It referred to a table of normal forms over on Wikipedia.
“REST” interfaces
I just wanted to get something that I’ve thought for many years on record, because I don’t think I’ve ever had the chance to discuss it much before, but I believe JSON web services (“REST APIs”) and web applications should deal only in two HTTP verbs, being: GET and POST. You use GET for queries and you use POST for submissions. All POST operations go through business logic for particular services and CRUDing URLs is a supremely bad idea, in my opinion. Just wanted to get that on record. Thanks. p.s for web applications you should 3xx on success, not 2xx on success; what you do for JSON web services is up to you, but for those 2xx is probably fine.
Introducing State Partitioning
This looks like a good idea: Introducing State Partitioning.