Brian Parsons

Looks neat. PHP esque + python string manipulation model is very tempting. My personal blog uses Mako which is embedded-python templates.

Link: The Slash Programming Language

Nice sleuthing and humorously written alert / background info on SSL connections in Android. SSL is one of the least problematic security / privacy issues with a smartphone, but I found it entertaining as I have gone through a round of hardening servers and apps and in the process have learned much about ciphers and handshake protocols.

Link: Why Android SSL was downgraded from AES256-SHA to RC4-MD5 in late 2010

Very interesting approach to increasing the quality and speed of your coding as well as learning new languages.

Link: Using Katas To Improve

I have had the pleasure of working with AlchemyAPI and it is for real. I found it to be excellent at entity and sentiment extraction. For many applications if you are looking for certain things (like brands) - you can have it leverage your own dictionary as one of the sources. Truly brilliant and for real. It’s great to see those guys getting some due finally.

Link: AlchemyAPI says it’s delivering Google-level deep learning as a service

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Great info on how to optimize mobile apps to be easy on data and battery.

Link: If You’re Programming a Cell Phone Like a Server You’re Doing it Wrong

One of the problems that MongoDB users face is the limitation on writes. I ran into this problem trying to scale MongoDB for a digital media company a few years ago. Mailbox/Dropbox has one approach to getting over this hurdle and even wrote a custom tool to help. Well worth a read if you are using MongoDB for anything.

Link: Dropbox Tech Blog » Blog Archive » Scaling MongoDB at Mailbox

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Great data here on Amazon RDS performance with different levels of provisioned IOPS. A good guide to use as your app grows and needs to go from tens to hundreds to thousands of ops per second.

Link: Benchmarking RDS with Provisioned IOPS