#architecture

We were charmed to the core over this ingenious book storage idea. Yes, these are just planks of painted plywood nailed to the supports for the loft above. They create perfect cubby spaces to store books, baskets and even small lights. Since we're in California, it would probably be a good idea to secure everything in place so it doesn't shake right off.

At Grooveshark, Gearman is an integral part of our backend technology stack.

In the Times Interactive News Department, we pay careful attention to caching strategy to make sure it’s a good fit for the project at hand.

"The point I am trying to make is we’re getting a little crazy with our architectures. These days, we write PHP just like Java, but it’s not Java. It works completely differently, and we shouldn’t try to force patterns that aren’t necessarily the best fit. You don’t need all that. Just write good code."

"I generally think of it as business logic, HTTP translation layer, and templates, rather than as model, controller and view, respectively."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh, wait, that's not The Onion. "Imagine for a moment that this trend continues – might Detroit become some sort of independent city-state, a mildly anarchic rough-and-ready town where the price of freedom is a willingness to work hard for yourself and with your neighbours?"

"Corridors make science-fiction believable, because they're so utilitarian by nature - really they're just a conduit to get from one (often overblown) set to another. So if any thought or love is put into one, if the production designer is smart enough to realise that corridors are the foundation on which larger sets are 'sold' to viewers, movie magic is close at hand."

"Slides from LinuxWorld presentation by John Engates, CTO of Rackspace."

"Start changing one single line of code in an application build on top of Drupal or ezPublish, to name only the two major ones, and you are in trouble. The moment you need something that is not natively supported, you enter the Dark Zone of CMS hell. You are going to spend a lot of money on development. You will never see the end of the tunnel. That is, until someone says, a few years from now, “Do we need all that crap? Let’s build something that fits our needs and that actually works”.Given number of available open-source CMS solutions, building one on your own sounds like a stupid idea. But if your website is 50% content management and 50% something else, you probably need to start with a web application framework like symfony or Django, rather than a CMS. These frameworks provide plugins that do part of the Content Management job already, so creating a CMS today is like assembling Lego bricks to build something that exactly fits your needs."

"our existing system will be maintained while new parts are built, and old parts swapped out for new as they're completed. The alternative - scrapping everything for "the big rewrite" - is untenable, particularly given our small (but growing!) engineering

"This was the simplest demonstration I could come up that there isn't enough information about a 3D object in its plane projections."

"Great for 90lb models, not so good for 260lb geeks."