Brent Sordyl's blog

Twitter Shifting More Code to JVM, Citing Performance and Encapsulation As Primary Drivers

July 5, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Last year the company announced that both its back-end message queue and Tweet storage had been re-written in Scala, and in the spring of 2010 the search team at Twitter started to rewrite the search engine. As part of the effort, Twitter changed the search storage from MySQL to a real-time version of Lucene. More recently the team announced that they were replacing the Ruby on Rails front-end for search with a Java server they called Blender. This change resulted in a 3x drop in search latencies.

(Full Story: Twitter Shifting More Code to JVM, Citing Performance and Encapsulation As Primary Drivers)

java, ruby, rubyonrails, twitter

Search Your Gmail Messages with ElasticSearch and Ruby

May 16, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

But, let’s get a bit personal, shall we? Let’s feed it with your own e-mail, imported from your own Gmail account.
We’ll use couple of Ruby gems: Gmail to fetch the e-mail data, Tire to put them into ElasticSearch and search them, and Sinatra to create a simple web application, which will allow us to search the messages.

(Full Story: Search Your Gmail Messages with ElasticSearch and Ruby)

ruby

elasticsearch, ruby

The Ruby Toolbox – Know your options!

May 10, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Ruby developers can choose from a variety of tools to get their job done.
The Ruby Toolbox gives you an overview of these tools, sorted in categories and rated by the amount of watchers and forks in the corresponding source code repository on GitHub so you can find out easily what options you have and which are the most common ones in the Ruby community.

(Full Story: The Ruby Toolbox – Know your options!)

programming, ruby

Pry is a powerful alternative to the standard IRB shell for Ruby

April 25, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Pry also aims to be more than an IRB replacement; it is an attempt to bring REPL driven programming to the Ruby language. It is currently not nearly as powerful as tools like SLIME for lisp, but that is the general direction Pry is heading.

(Full Story: Pry is a powerful alternative to the standard IRB shell for Ruby)

irb, ruby

Learn Ruby by teaching yourself to make these Rspec tests pass

April 21, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

(Full Story: Learn Ruby by teaching yourself to make these Rspec tests pass)

ruby, tutorial

Making Java Fun with Mirah

March 22, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Mirah is currently demonstrably under heavy development as can be seen at its Github repository and there are a few issues which are currently awaiting resolution, however, it is usable right now and there are some seriously awesome features in the pipeline too. So if you’re finding that you are losing your marbles with the geological pace of Java production I implore you to give it a go. Read the code, check out the examples and get involved in the community. If nothing else it may supercharge your web app development but more likely; it may well be the best thing to happen to Java since, umm, Java.

(Full Story: Making Java Fun with Mirah)

java, jruby, mirah, ruby

Ruby In Steel – VisualStudio Ruby IDE

March 10, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Ruby In Steel 2 supports Ruby 1.9.2, Ruby 1.8, JRuby and Rails 3 within Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

(Full Story: Ruby In Steel – VisualStudio Ruby IDE)

ide, ruby, rubyonrails

ide, ruby, rubyonrails, visualstudio

Goliath: Non-blocking, Ruby 1.9 Web Server

March 9, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Goliath has been in production at PostRank for well over a year, serving a sustained rate of 500+ requests/s for months at a time (no memory leaks, no restarts). Internally, we use it to interface with MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, as well as many other local and remote web-services. Goliath supports HTTP keep-alive, request pipelining, and can be used to build real-time, streaming API’s – all features we use to optimize our infrastructure.

(Full Story: Goliath: Non-blocking, Ruby 1.9 Web Server)

ruby, rubyonrails

Graylog2: Java, Ruby, MongoDB-powered log management, monitoring, and alerting

February 28, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Graylog2 a slick log management, monitoring, and alerting tool powered by Java, Ruby, and MongoDB, performs these well. Graylog consists of a Java server that collects your logging data and stuffs it into MongoDB and a Ruby on Rails web interface for searching, filtering, and graphing that data.

(Full Story: Graylog2: Java, Ruby, MongoDB-powered log management, monitoring, and alerting)

java, logging, mongodb, ruby

Ruby for kids