What’s the Point of a Benchmark? Wikipedia alleges that a benchmark is meant to make it easier to compare different computer systems just by looking at a number. For a benchmark to be useful, it should be run independently. How can I compare my graphics card to your graphics card if we can’t run the same test? So, a benchmark would let you and I run the same set of code and reach a similar result.

What’s the point of an average, anyway? Common knowledge (the 1967 Children’s World Book Encyclopedia) states that an average has something to do with an arithmetic mean and/or a “central tendency”. I’m pretty sure that a “central tendency” is a sly sexual reference, so we’ll go back over to mathematics being mean. What’s an Average? An average is the sum of all numbers in a sequence divided by the count of all numbers in a sequence.

The email started with “Your AWS account is compromised”. That’s the kind of thing that makes you stop whatever you’re doing and sit bolt upright. Amazon Web Services emailed me because one of my secret account keys had been posted to a publicly accessible web page - in this case, it was a github repository under my account. It seems that I had accidentally committed my AWS access keys to a git repository hosted on github.

Let’s say you’ve gone and contributed to a project that’s hosted on GitHub. The usual way to do this is to fork the repository, make some changes on a branch in your own repository, and then send a pull requestback to the original author. What if you need to change something after you’ve submitted a pull request? I ran into this situation the other day after submitting a pull request to the basho_docs repository - there were some clarifications needed to the C# Taste of Riak.

Getting Git Head over to the main git website and download the appropriate git for your OS. Or you could do one of the following: Linux: sudo apt-get install git or sudo yum install git OS X: brew install git or just download the client. Windows: The easiest thing is to use Chocolatey and run cinst git. Powershell users can also install posh-git: cinst poshgit. Learning Git If you wanted to get started with a rapid immersion course on git, I recommend Git Immersion.

I’m not referring to sensible naming conventions like “table names are always [singular|plural]” or “method names should be short but descriptive.” Those naming conventions are fine. They’re safe. They protect us from the stupidity of future generations of us (or at least uncaffeinated versions of ourselves). Poisonous naming conventions are the naming conventions that assume something about the physical implementation of a thing. When you name an attribute DCreatedAt because it’s a date, or objAppointment because it’s an object, or even when you name a table t_Users or tbl_Permissions, you’re poisoning the world.

I go to a lot of conferences. If you ask my co-workers, I probably go to too many conferences. Going to a lot of conferences, I get a chance to see a lot of keynotes, closing keynotes, and plenary discussions. Different conferences have different keynotes, but the one thing that sticks out in my head is that the keynotes and opening talks at a conference set the mood for the entire event.

Why would anyone want to use PostgreSQL instead of SQL Server? There are a lot of factors to consider when choosing how to store your data. Sometimes we need to look deeper than the standard choice and consider something new. If you’re starting a brand new project, where should you store your data? Here are ten reasons why you might want to consider PostgreSQL over SQL Server. Releases Every Year Let’s face it, waiting three to five years for new functionality to roll out in any product is painful.

I’ve been working on implementing some infrastructure code for a client. We’re building robust partition swapping to make it easy to load data without disrupting user queries. We’re doing everything eles the right way, but partition swapping makes it really easy to correct a bad load of a past data. The upside is that this code is really easy to write. There are enough examples, samples, and previous samples out there that a lot of the basics can be easily implemented.

If you’re like me, you probably don’t think a lot about what you throw into the trash on your computer – you just put files and folders in there to be deleted and, eventually, you empty the trash. The other day I dropped a 40GB virtual machine into the trash and then told OS X to empty the trash. A few hours later, it was still chugging away at pretending it was deleting the trash.