It's the time of year for family gatherings, so here's a repulsive group portrait of some nearly universal pathologies. Try not to read this while you're eating. Budgetecture We've all been hit with budgetecture.  That's when sound technology choices go out the window in favor of cost-cutting. The conversation goes something like this. "Do we really need X?" asks the project sponsor. (A.k.a. the gold owner.) For "X", you can substitute nearly anything that's vitally necessary to make the system run: software licenses, redundant servers, offsite backups, or power supplies.

A number of readers have asked me for reference implementations of the stability and capacity patterns. I've begun to create some free implementations to go along with Release It. As of today, it just includes a drop-in formatter that you can use in place of the java.util.logging default (which is horrible). This formatter keeps all the fields lined up in columns, including truncating the logger name and method name if necessary.

What does "done" mean to you?  I find that my definition of "done" continues to expand. When I was still pretty green, I would say "It's done" when I had finished coding.  (Later, a wiser and more cynical colleague taught me that "done" meant that you had not only finished the work, but made sure to tell your manager you had finished the work.) The next meaning of "done" that I learned had to do with version control.

It's taken me a while to get to this talk. Not because it was uninteresting, just because it sent my mind in so many directions that I needed time to collect my scattered thoughts. Objects and Lego Blocks On Thursday, James Noble delivered a Keynote about "The Lego Hypothesis". As you might guess, he was talking about the dream of building software as easily as a child assembles a house from Lego bricks.

O'Reilly has announced an upcoming conference called Velocity. From the announcement: Web companies, big and small, face many of the same challenges: sites must be faster, infrastructure needs to scale, and everything must be available to customers at all times, no matter what. Velocity is the place to obtain the crucial skills and knowledge to build successful web sites that are fast, scalable, resilient, and highly available. Unfortunately, there are few opportunities to learn from peers, exchange ideas with experts, and share best practices and lessons learned.

Along with the longer analysis pieces, I've decided to post the entirety of my notes from QCon San Francisco. A few of my friends and colleagues are fellow mind-mappers, so this is for them. Nygard's Mind Map from QCon This file works with FreeMind, an fast, fluid, and free mind mapping tool. 

Being fast doesn't make you scalable. But it does mean you can handle more capacity with your current infrastructure. Take a look at this diagram of request handlers. You can see that it takes 13 request handling threads to process this amount of load. In the next diagram, the requests arrive at the same rate, but in this picture it takes just 200 milliseconds to answer each one. Same load, but only 3 request handlers are needed at a time.

Several of the speakers here have echoed two themes about databases. 1. MySQL is in production in a lot of places. I think the high cost of commercial databases (read: Oracle) leads to a kind of budgetechture that concentrates all data in a single massive database. If you remove that cost from the equation, the idea of either functionally partitioning your data stores or creating multiple shards becomes much more palatable.

Several vendors are sponsoring QCon. (One can only wonder what the registration fees would be if they didn't.) Of these, I think three have products worth immediate evaluation. SemmleIn the category of "really cool, but would I pay for it?" is Semmle. Their flagship product, SemmleCode, lets you treat your codebase as a database against which you can run queries. SemmleCode groks the static structure of your code, including relationships and dependencies.

One of the great things about virtual infrastructure is that you can treat it as a service. I use Yahoo's shared hosting service for this blog. That gives me benefits: low cost and very quick setup. On the down side, I can't log in as root. So when Yahoo has a problem, I have a problem. Yesterday, there was something wrong with Yahoo's install of Movable Type. As a result, I couldn't post my "five things".