Pervasive Code

Last year I was doing mobile development and there was interesting Linux-as-smartphone-OS stuff going on. Now I’m doing Ruby on Rails development and there’s interesting server grid stuff going on. Here’s what I’m looking forward to finding out more about (all of these are things I’ve been watching or directly researching already):
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Once upon a time, before Google pwn3d internet search, there were several competing definitions for full text search. Altavista more or less gave you results matching the exact strings you gave it, but in a crazy order that made it painful to use. Excite (my favorite back then) used a dictionary to achieve stemming and synonym matches: searching for ‘dogs’ would also match documents that contained ‘canines’ or ‘dog’. Then Google blew them all away, and established a dominant set of expectations for how text search behaves.

I forgot about this, which is why I’m frustrated by the almost ridiculous complexity of the major server-side text search engines available right now. But it makes sense, once you learn what the options are.
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Most of his rules are applicable to generic software consulting.

Josh’s Rules (of Database Contracting)

I’ve been reading about PostgreSQL. I like what I see, a lot.

I’m a database weenie, which is unusual among application developers from what I’ve seen. I’ve found that almost universally, application developers don’t understand transactions, don’t understand basic data modeling rules, and generally regard RDBMSs as a pain in the butt, to be marginalized as much as possible.
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