Blog of James Golick: software engineer, entrepreneur, and speaker.
Visit jamesgolick.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Dec 2009 – May 2013
Software Engineering 4Systems & Performance 2Databases & Data 1Career & Management 1
A while back, it came to my attention that ruby's net/https implementation had an insecure default: not verifying TLS certificates (OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE). I wrote an article about it for RubyInside, and helped @geemus fix the issue in his excon gem. Despite this being an incredibly serious security issue, nobody…
For the last few weeks, I've been working on a couple of patches to tcmalloc, Google's super high performance memory allocator. I'm going to post about them soon, but first I thought it would be cool to give some background about what a memory allocator actually does. So, if you've ever wondered what happens when you…
One of MRI's big performance problems is that method cache expiry is global. That is, any time you make a change to any class anywhere, the entire VM's method caches get busted at the same time. This is why you'll frequently hear people saying that "calling Object#extend is bad".
I've been a big proponent of NoSQL for a while. I have played with just about all of the new generation of data stores. We almost got cassandra running in production once, and we've been running mongodb in production for about six months now.