The problem with sitting on these daily link posts is that the links go out of date. Sigh. Here are some links.

Twitter

I found a couple of things about this InfoQ article about Twitter’s infrastructure odd. I was expecting it to be a bit more of a Rails hit-piece, frankly, so it was nice to see a quote like this one from Evan Weaver:

I wouldn’t say that Rails has served as poorly in any way, it’s just that we outgrew it very quickly.

Twitter has unique needs, so it’s not surprising that the Rails stack doesn’t serve them anymore, but they did get pretty far with the Rails stack.

This was interesting – first, from Charles Humble, writing the article:

You might assume that the move to the JVM was largely driven by performance and scalability concerns, but in fact the existing Twitter codebase performs well… Rather, the move to JVM is driven as much by a need for better developer productivity as it it for better performance

And this from Weaver:

As we move into a light-weight Service Oriented Architecture model, static typing becomes a genuine productivity boon.

The author concludes the article with this:

[Rails] does however come with well known costs, both in terms of performance and scalability, and perhaps also the relative maturity of the libraries and tool chain. In addition, the experience at Twitter suggests that the Ruby on Rails stack can produce some significant architectural challenges as the code base grows.

Which strikes me as an overgeneralization of what Weaver said – I’m almost willing to believe that static typing is a benefit if you are doing SOA at Twitter’s scale, but I haven’t seen the benefit on smaller projects in my experience.

Amazon

As somebody who got their Amazon Affiliate account zapped when Amazon pulled the rug out from under Illinois residents, I was following with some interest the similar news out of California. (Although not quite identical, I had several months notice).

There’s been a little bit of confusion on what actually happened – a lot of people seem to think California is trying to tax affiliate revenue (I can’t find the link, but I saw someone argue that their affiliate revenue was already being taxed so shouldn’t be taxed again, which is wrong in a couple of different ways.) Slate magazine has a decent overview, which I’ll note I basically agree with on the substance of the issue.

Current law is that online transactions are only subject to sales tax if the company involved has a physical presence in the state. The California law defines “presence” to include any affiliates who get a payout – the affiliate revenue isn’t taxed as such, but the existence of an affiliate means that other Amazon transactions in California would be subject to California sales tax. Amazon responded to the law by canceling all their affiliates in California, as they did in Illinois, to avoid having to charge sales tax, and also to avoid having to calculate and manage sales tax, and also to avoid a court case that they might well lose.

Anyway, you may agree or disagree with the California law – though it doesn’t seem inherently any less silly than the various state laws that impose income taxes in visiting professional athletes. For my part, I don’t understand why the fact that Amazon has put themselves in a position where paying sales takes kills their business model should be my problem – I understand why there was an initial push not to charge sales tax on the internet, but I think the social benefit of privileging on line sales has probably passed. Even if you don’t agree with that argument, though, it’s hard for me to see how Amazon using their affiliates as pawns is the best or most responsible way for them to be advocating their case.

New additions to the workflow

I’ve got a couple of new writing workflow things to mention. There’s a new app in the Mac App Store called Marked, which is a classic “One Thing Well” deal. For $2.99, it’s basically a Markdown preview window, but has the very useful feature that it will live-update a file you are editing every time you save. So it’s basically adding MarsEdit’s preview window to any editor. It also makes it easy to copy the resulting HTML into the clipboard if you, say, want to post it to WordPress. It also lets you change the Markdown processor if you’d like. It’s nicely handy for $2.99.

On the iPad side, WriteRoom has finally been updated to a universal app. It’s effectively PlainText Pro – the same basic (pretty) layout with a couple of extra features. It’s got an easy to configure extra keyboard row, and a couple of other handy features. My main negative is that, when the app is in landscape mode it doesn’t use all the horizontal space for text, that’d be a useful option. One thing I like about it, relative to other editors is that it live-syncs with Dropbox, giving much more of a feel of directly editing the Dropbox file than the other editors that make you download the file locally and manually sync. Overall, though I like it.

I also tried out an iPad app called Daedalus, which has a very interesting UI metaphor but doesn’t really fit with the way I manage files. If you are willing to do all your notes and writing in it, though, the organization looks like it might be handy.

RubyMine 3.2

Quick mention that RubyMine 3.2 is out, with support for Rails 3.1 features like the asset pipeline and CoffeeScript. Mostly, I’m having some stability problems with it (it tends to freeze up for me), but the editor and its interaction with Rails continues to get better.

Avdi on Law of Demeter

Finally, speaking of things I thought I was going to disagree with, but wound up agreeing with almost completely (and also speaking of week-old links…), here’s Avdi Grimm on the Law of Demeter. Avdi comes down on the side of actually useful guidelines for managing chains of method calls.