Anthropic just released its most powerful model to date. I have been working with it and wanted to share some initial thoughts on the model.

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This article covers some advanced techniques you can use to debug memory leaks in Ruby.

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Over the years one of the most complex issues we have had to deal with at Discourse was flaky tests, in this post I would like talk a bit about the various patterns we have come across and ways we tackle this issue.

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My i3 window manager setup

almost 5 years ago

It has been about 3.5 weeks since I moved from Windows to Linux, during the switch I also moved to using the tiling i3 window manager. I would like to tell you a bit about it.

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I stuck with Windows 10 as my primary OS for 6 years, despite being a Ruby developer. In this blog post I would like to cover why this happened.

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Effectively dealing with logs is a critical skill you should hone. In this blog post I will cover how we handle web application error logs at Discourse, both in production and in development.

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Often in development we have an annoying message in our console that we simply can not find the source of, here is a little trick you can use to hunt messages like this down.

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Ruby's external malloc problem

almost 6 years ago

In this post I would like to cover a severe, extremely hard to debug vector for memory bloat in Ruby which can be triggered by the PG gem.

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Current patterns in Active Record lead to enormous amounts of resource usage. Here is an analysis of Rails 5.2

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How we manage schema changes at Discourse minimizing downtime

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It is very likely your Rails application is full of duplicate strings, here are some tricks you can use to get rid of them.

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How we instrument Rails at Discourse and how you can, too.

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How do you go about debugging high CPU usage in a production Rails system?

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What is the fastest and most elegant way to instrument a method in Ruby?

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Chrome recently pushed out support for Brotli, in this post I will cover what this means to you.

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WebSockets, caution required!

about 8 years ago

WebSockets seem to be gaining a resurgence, suddenly they are sexy again. I think this is the wrong message.

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Recently, I discovered a performance regression on a very common page on Discourse. This post documents my approach and specific fixes I applied.

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Debugging memory leaks in Ruby

almost 9 years ago

Tools, tips and techniques for diagnosing and fixing Ruby memory leaks

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Announcing rubybench.org

about 9 years ago

Announcing rubybench.org

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Speeding up Rails 4.2

over 9 years ago

Optimising Rails 4.2 using Flame Graphs and Memory Profiler

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Vintage JavaScript begone

about 10 years ago

One major issue all “one page” JavaScript apps have is updating clients, this is how I solved this for Discourse.

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Wishing for a long running ruby benchmark.

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Lessons learned moving commenting to Discourse

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Demystifying the Ruby GC

over 10 years ago

The Ruby GC may seem exceedingly complex to some, in this article I try to shed some light on it.

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I just added some helpers that allow you to easily perform live restarts of unicorn processes with zero downtime.

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Recently I spent some time working on a Docker container for Discourse to ease our deployment story.

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This Blog is now 100% powered by Discourse

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The number #1 productivity killer for me is the trivial inconvenience, it does not stop me from working… just make my job very frustrating.

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Analysis of performance issues in Ruby can often be fairly complex, in this post I cover a new technique you can use with MiniProfiler.

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Do you smoke test?

about 11 years ago

I just introduced the first smoke test for Discourse. Reasoning, techniques and lessons learned.

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iOS6 is out, and with it an essentially broken maps app, here are my thoughts on this matter.

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MiniProfiler Ruby Edition

over 11 years ago

For the last few months we have been working on a version of MiniProfiler for Rails, here is the low-down

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Leaving Stack Exchange

almost 12 years ago

I am leaving Stack Exchange, why this happened and what is next?

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Recently I embarked on a mission to find and and build tools for dealing with broken links on the Stack Exchange network, here are some things I learned.

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While preparing for my talk at Codemania I started filling my slides with links, clearly not something that scales. So, instead, here is a big list of interesting tools and resources that can help you journey through the murky waters of web performance.

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Learn about a change introduced in the 2.6.39 kernel that has huge impact on your users perceived web performance.

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We are pushing a 2.0 public release of MiniProfiler, the following post describes most of the awesome changes.

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Stop paying your jQuery tax

about 12 years ago

The last script holding in your header is usually jQuery, learn how to move it to your footer and why you should.

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A common issue many users have with Dapper is the ability to insert records into a database, in this post I cover some options and a solution I developed.

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In this post I cover the history, diagnosis and eventual repair of some erratic performance we were experiencing at Stack Overflow.

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In this post I outline the process and method we used to optimize routing at Stack Overflow

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Using rather simple techniques I practically eliminated all of the spam on this blog, here is a technical explanation

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In this post I demonstrate how to extend the ASP.NET error page with additional information about the SQL that failed.

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In this post I explain how I ported a rather tricky page to dapper, it highlights usage of a new helper called SqlBuilder, that lives in Dapper.Contrib

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Finding views in ASP.NET MVC3 is an often overlooked performance concern.

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In this post I work through one method you can use to get controller, view and partial render times in an MVC3 app.

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I am very happy to re-announce the MVC mini profiler, used in production at Stack Overflow.

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I have been spending a fair amount of time tuning Stack Overflow, in this post I will walk through the process of tuning a single page.

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Does the world even need another ORM?

Why we took a step back at Stack Overflow and wrote our on mini ORM

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At my new job I have been looking at better ways of highlighting recent interesting answers.

Here is a list of answers I came across in July that I found interesting.

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Diagnosing runaway/high CPU in production .Net apps has always been a dark art reserved for the true master debuggers.

No longer.

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Got Flare?

over 14 years ago

A little bit about my new bug tracker. Can tracking bugs be fun?

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I love rspec, and wanted to see what happens if you bring it to .Net, here is a tiny step by step guide to writing your own rspec tests for a C# project.

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Our new startup, Media Browser

over 14 years ago

After a lot of thought and research I have decided to see if we can make a business out of Media Browser.

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Media Browser / Video Browser has always been free "as-in-beer":http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FreeAsInBeer and free as-in-speech.

Will it remain free?

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About some upcoming feature for Media Browser.

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We just changed the way our source code is licensed, this post covers the reasons and details of the changes.

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I am going to try to post a little bit about my adventures refactoring Media Browser. In this post I am covering a some aspects of entity resolution.

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In this post I offer a streamlined mechanism for debugging Vista Media Center plugins in Visual Studio.

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For the last few weeks I have been forced to use a very slow website. This has left me feeling very demoralized. This is why.

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Earlier this week I lost my old trusty server which hosts www.samsaffron.com and www.mediabrowser.tv died.

I decided to migrate all the data to a new VPS (virtual private server), here is a sketchy account of how this all happened.

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Deadlocked

over 15 years ago

In SQL Server a SELECT statement can deadlock against an UPDATE statement without being in a transaction. Why does this happens? What is a good approach to SQL Server deadlocks?

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Recently, I had to support a rails server which is deep behind a firewall. Here I offer a somewhat sketchy account of how I am able to support it.

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Why I started off Video Browser, where it is today, and what are the future plans.

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In general when generating rss feed in Rails you will be using the builder library, it can be fairly slow unless you take special care.

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Watch out when you use ActiveRecord eager loading, it has the potential to wreak havoc if you are not careful.

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A new release of Video Browser contains a few bug fixes

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I just posted a new version of Video Browser that support “by genre” and “by runtime” sort options for movies.

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Yet another way to enumerate through Enumerables if you are using the prototype javascript library.

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On Rails, I find myself quite often fixing up an old migration early in my projects, at this point I already have a bunch of data in my database and I would like to keep it.

So I created a Rake task that takes care of this.

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I just posted a new version of video browser in my download section!

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In this post I would like to give you all the information you need to get started with Ruby On Rails, on Windows. I will cover the tools you need, the resources you need and some tips.

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Writing your own blog software is an ideal first exercise when faced with learning a new web platform.

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Hello World

about 16 years ago

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Video browser, is a little plugin for Vista MCE that let's you browse your videos the way they were meant to be browsed.

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Goodbye Altiris

over 16 years ago

Well, it’s that time to change jobs. Goodbye Altiris.

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Video Browser for Vista MCE

over 16 years ago

This is a post about my first attempts with Video Browser.

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IDisposable in Ruby

over 16 years ago

An example implementation of the IDisposable pattern in the Ruby language.

It looks much nicer in Ruby.

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Implementing the UPSERT (insert or update) pattern in MS SQL Server can be tricky. In this post I explore the various advantages and disadvantages of various implementations.

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Keep it simple

about 17 years ago

4 different embedded databases offer 4 different APIs to create a database.

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Embedded .NET database shootout

about 17 years ago

Testing .NET embedded DBs

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