I’ve mentioned before that I think programming languages should have a REPL (Read-Eval-Print-Loop). Unfortunately, PHP does not have one natively.  However, I just discovered that Facebook has opened sourced a REPL for PHP – so now you can test out your PHP code without needing to write and run a script. Working in Python, I’ve […]

I’m currently using Thrift at work.  It’s a convenient way to shuttle data across different services and to invoke remote procedure calls.  I like it because of how lightweight it is, so I don’t have to wrestle with code for a kitchen when all I need is a faucet. The one downside to Thrift at […]

Divide and Conquer. It was while reading the Thrift white paper, and seeing this line in the conclusion that the connection hit me: Thrift has enabled Facebook to build scalable backend services efficiently by enabling engineers to divide and conquer. That’s exactly the point of all the various agile methodologies: enable a team to divide […]