In a recent post, I talked about how I used Postgres DISTINCT ON to remove a pesky N+1 query. That was actually one of the final touches in immproving the Graphics#index action for Box Out. Prior to that, I whipped together a

For the second half of 2014 and 2015, most of my time at GitHub was spent working on moving the notifications feature off the primary MySQL cluster on to a new MySQL cluster and making the feature resilient to failure of that cluster. When

Sometimes I feel developers think that performance is a dark art. It is not. In my experience, well performing systems come down to this: fewer and faster. If you are doing something a lot, do it fewer times. If you are doing something that

de•cay noun - the state or process of rotting or decomposition. Let us kick off the new year with a lovely post on decay. All systems decay. Even when you continually work on improving the system, it decays. That said, in my experience,

I have been fortunate enough to work on a few high throughput applications (Words with Friends, GitHub.com, Gaug.es, etc.; hundreds to thousands of requests per second) in my life where a database was the bottleneck. I am far from an expert on

The norm for rate limiting these days seems to be based on the number of requests a consumer can make in a given time window. The problem with this is that all requests are not equal. Some requests are more expensive than other requests

In the interest of getting back into writing, I want to break the seal with a simple “what have I been up to and thinking about lately” style post. Hopefully future topics will be more focused and frequent. For the past year, I have