The wonderful Paul Boag from Headscape interviewed me for the latest episode of Boagworld, almost certainly the best web design podcast on the planet. We talk about my “controversial” views on web standards, Blueprint CSS, and more.
Unfortunately, I hate my voice, and it sounds even worse when propped up against Paul’s sexy British accent. Oh well — I think it came off pretty decent, anyhow.
Continue reading »Several months ago, I spoke at Refresh Seattle. Kenny Meyers came. We met and became friends. For months, he has bothered me to write a blog post on the topic I spoke about, rehashing my slides and presentation. For months, I ignored him. So, the bastard wrote the blog post himself.
And it’s good. Check it out. Visit site »
Sarah pointed me to this stop-motion animation today, and my jaw dropped. It’s incredibly beautiful, but beyond that, I can’t even begin to conceive how difficult and tedious it must have been to make. Truly an amazing work. MUTO”>Visit site »
Keith wrote a really nice and thorough piece on how to engage Blue Flavor, if you might be interested in talking to us. He talks about how we scope, estimate, and charge for projects, what kind of projects we want (and don’t want), and how both sides can be successful in the early stages — and this is only part one of a series. Visit site »
Leaving happy hour highlighted by serendipitous Brightkite meetup with @jsayles.
Hairs cut; feel 10 pounds lighter.
Another new Django book on the horizon. Visit site »
After nearly two years of high profile scaling problems, Twitter is planning to abandon Ruby on Rails…
As a Django fan and evangelist, I admit it would give me great pleasure to see this as a colossal failure for Rails, point, laugh, and generally poke fun at all the Rails fanboys and girls.
But let’s be real for one minute. Twitter doesn’t suck because of Rails. Twitter sucks because they have ridiculous amounts of traffic (especially to their API and SMS gateways), a limited ability to cache (a non-realtime Twitter is a pretty useless Twitter), and (as far as I can tell), they’re not making any money, so they probably have limited resources to pour into more hardware.
The bottom line is that Twitter will probably cause major scaling problems for any platform, be it Rails, Django, Java, .NET, PHP, or tin cans with a string tied between them. Ruby is undeniably slow compared to Python, Java, and PHP, but I really doubt the problems Twitter deals with are at the Ruby level, anyway. Much as I wish they weren’t, anyone who says Twitter sucks because of Ruby on Rails is either foolish or joking.
Twitter sucks because of Rails. Just joking. Visit site »
My Twitter status page on http://jeffcroft.com now shows who I talk to/about the most: http://jeffcroft.com/statuses/ :)
A weird thing happened today: during our meeting, I had a hard time hearing @twatson.