Server-Side Magazine

Today we caught up with Andrei Alexandrescu for a “10 Question” interview. He is a Romanian born research engineer at Facebook living in the US, you can contact him on his website erdani.com or @incomputable.

We will talk about some of the juicy stuff that going on at Facebook, so let’s get started.

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Over my programming career, I have made a lot of mistakes in several different languages. In fact, if I write 10 or more lines of code and it works the first time, I’ll get a bit suspicious and test it more rigorously than usual. I would expect to find a syntax error or a bad array reference or a misspelled variable or something. [...]

In this example I will show how you can perform a standard Maven build whilst keeping your unit and integration tests in separate packages. [...]

In this example I will expand upon my previous example of keeping your unit and integration tests in separate packages, and explain how to also produce code coverage statistics. [...]

This blog shows how to seperate your unit and integration tests in a multi-module maven project whilst providing seperate test coverage results for each. [...]

“grep” one of the most frequently used UNIX command stands for “Global Regular Expression Print”. This grep command tutorial is not about theory of UNIX grep but to practical use of grep in UNIX and here I am sharing my experience [...]

Looking around at some UTF-8 background, I see the same incorrect story being repeated over and over. The incorrect version is: [...]

O’Reilly MySQL CE 2011: Jeremy Cole, “Big and Small Data at @Twitter”

Google turned up the heat on its +1 feature Wednesday, rolling out the new +1 button across select partners sites (including Mashable) and introducing a new tool for publishers to embed it on their own sites. [...]

A severed head is never fun, and in git this is no different. In fact, a detached head can cause quite the headache. In this article I will discuss what a detached head is, how it can happen, and most importantly, what you can do about it. But before I begin, let’s rehash a bit about how git works. [...]

.htaccess, the file which control the Apache webserver, is very useful and allows you to do a lot of things. In this article, I have compiled 10 .htaccess snippets that any web developer should have in his toolbox. [...]

Every work day Facebook is safely updated with hundreds of changes including bug fixes, new features, and product improvements. Given hundreds of engineers, thousands of changes every week and hundreds of millions of users we have worldwide, this task seems like it should be impossible. In this tech talk, Chuck Rossi will dig into the tools and processes built by our Release Engineering team that make it possible to push daily updates to the site. [...]

The question of why and how git is so flexible is a really interesting one. Is it a consequence of its having been around for so long? Or that it was forged, as it were, at the hands of people who were doing real, large projects (e.g. Linux)? [...]

[...] I have bad news for you buddy, all code is crap. No matter how much effort you put on it, there is always a majority of programmers who are going to think that your code sucks and that they could have done it 10 times better. [...]

The term ‘geek’, once used to label a circus freak, has morphed in meaning over the years. What was once an unusual profession transferred into a word indicating social awkwardness. [...]

Git is categorized as DVCS (Distributed Version Control System), because is not dependant on a central server. So the academic way for working with Git is pushing/pulling data from/to each developer repository. [...]

Just as we’ve provided a series of tips on how to make your Windows 2008 Server run at its utmost maximum efficiency and speed, Monitis has put together advice on making the Linux OS work miracles for you. [...]

Lars Hesel Christensen shares lessons learned from implementing a mobile banking application for Android, presenting the architecture, the technology&tools used, what works and what should be avoided. [...]

The latest version of WordPress — 3.2 Beta 1 — is now available for download. Interested parties can grab the .zip file and install away.

The new release brings a slew of interesting features, including a new theme, a facelift for the Admin UI, new fullscreen composing modes and more. [...]

Years ago I read Streamed Lines: Branching Patterns for Parallel Software Development, and many of the thoughts have stayed me. Think of it as a catalogue of Design Patterns for version control workflows. [...]

Microsoft has been reaching out to developers who use third-party languages and applications with a raft of initiatives and announcements. Many developers are surprised when by the comprehensiveness of the company’s Interoperability Bridges and Labs Center.

But it has to do more to win developers over to Azure. [...]

We’ve all lived the nightmare. A new developer shows up at work, and you try to be welcoming, but he1 can’t seem to get up to speed; the questions he asks reveal basic ignorance; and his work, when it finally emerges, is so kludgey that it ultimately must be rewritten from scratch by more competent people. And yet his interviewers—and/or the HR department, if your company has been infested by that bureaucratic parasite – swear that they only hire above-average/A-level/top-1% people. [...]

The OpenID Foundation has warned that flawed implementations of the Attribute Exchange (AX) OpenID extension allow potential attackers to assume other users’ identities on certain web sites. Security researchers had found that some web sites which participate in OpenID don’t verify whether the transmitted data has been signed. [...]

Propel 1.6.0 stable is there. It’s full of new features, robust, and still fast as hell. It’s the best Propel ever. If you’ve been waiting for happiness in the ORM world, if you want web development to be fun, and if you prefer to let the computer do all the heavy duty stuff for you, you’ve got to try this new release. [...]

Learning to code is something every tech-minded person should try at least once — and the wealth of online courses, many of which are free or surprisingly inexpensive, make learning about programming easier than ever. [...]