Code / The Appnel Group 

Recognition!

Serdar Yegulalp picked up on my Open Source Is Not Just a License post and highlighted it in a post to his Information Week blog. He writes:

There is indeed a great deal to gain by contributing, and while many people might sniff at the fact that at least some of it is PR (as Tim put it), it’s easy to forget that PR is a crucial ingredient in the glue that holds together a community. A person with a bad reputation as a fair player is less likely to be welcomed into any community; someone who has a track record of playing fairly — or at least attempting to play more fairly — will be welcomed and will be able to reap the benefits all the more enthusiastically. You tend to give more when you know you’ll get more in return.

He goes on:

What Tim means by open source not just being a license is reflected in all of this. Anyone can write and release something under an open source license — yes, even Microsoft — but that doesn’t mean they’ll be used, re-used, built on or well-respected. That takes time and engagement, and a sense that you need to give as good as you get.

There are times when I think I’m talking to myself in what I think. Perhaps I could be mistaken.

Concatenated Indexes for MT

Watching to stream of commits to the MTOS repository I noticed one that intrigued me — concatenated indexes in MT objects. I asked and Brad Choate obliged me with an answer:

Prior to MT 4.1, the MT object schema never supported the declaration of concatenated indexes. Meaning, creating an index on two or more columns. Now that we can declare these, we’re making use of them, since it makes a big difference for the larger MT installations. So yes, it is significant, if you have lots of blogs with lots of entries.

This is a “wonky” sort of thing, but it will be great for performance and a prime example of the good work being done to improve the overall performance of MT in the next official release or two.

Being Competitive is "Dirty"

Anil Dash made a very interesting post noting the pending release of WordPress 2.5 and suggests users consider Movable Type since upgrading means breaking a lot of things. As TechCrunch notes the WordPress crowd (Automattic really) is “pissed” with Matt Mullenweg calling it “desperate and dirty.” This of course is the pot calling the kettle black if it were true, but it’s not. Dash’s arguments are, to my knowledge, factually correct, quite logical and polite. To me it’s just a company being competitive in professional way. It would seem that Automattic is not up to dealing with with that sort of heat yet.

I’m not at all surprised by their reaction though. The WP community lead by the Automattic staff has dished out a lot of crap over the years at Six Apart’s expense without the professionalism that Dash extended them with this one post. I don’t doubt Automattic’s dedication to open source or what they do, but, given past behavior, I’ve always questioned their ability to conduct themselves in a way that professional and enterprise customers demand. This reaction only supports that observation and only makes me rest easier as enterprise consultant specializing in Movable Type systems.

Isolating Performance Issues

Over on the mtos-dev mailing list, David Jacobs notes a post from one of the Tumblr developers about a bug in MySQL’s InnoDB engine severely impacting peformance and goes on to say:

It just goes to show how difficult to isolate performance issues are. In addition to the web server, templates, third party plugins, etc. Sometimes you hit an unforeseen bug in something completely external.

True.

We’ve been discussing performance on the list a lot on mtos-dev since it’s the primary focus of MT 4.2. Web applications of any complexity are exponentially more complex than the desktop software I started writing at the start of my career. Web applications like MT are made of dozens of individual pieces of software with different developers, milestones and objectives. The number of combinations and configurations are virtually infinite and in constant change that testing and debugging issues is quite a challenge. It’s the price we pay for the distributed nature of the Internet where so many small pieces are loosely joined.

The Value of Clean Code

In an O'Reilly LAMP blog post, "Clean Code is Easier to Debug", chromatic writes:

Consistent code requires much less brainpower to decipher its structure, leaving that much more brainpower to find real problems.

I have found this to be quite true and encourage any developer to give it a try. Since I've been paying more attention to how clean my code is I've found that not only can track down issues faster, but that I can refresh my memory of how a piece of code works faster.

"I don't have time for that though Tim," you might say. It doesn't take as much time and effort as you'd think.

[Read more →]