Jeremy Zawodny's blog

In the last year or so, I’ve been working to reduce my computer inventory so that I spend less time administering things and more time actually using them. As part of that, Kathleen and I recently got new iPads (the retina display is amazing).

After a bit of tinkering around, it occurred to me to try pairing it with the Apple Wireless Keyboard. It’s clearly not the same as a laptop but it’s definitely a replacement for a netbook or low-end notebook. Kathleen took to it right away, so now we each have one.

It’s going to be interesting to see how much I’m able to do with an iPad, wireless keyboard, and decent Internet access.

I’m happy to see that the vacuum created by O’Reilly Media dropping the annual MySQL Conference has been filled by the good people at Percona in the form of the Percona MySQL Conference, which is in Santa Clara from April 10-12th.

I’ll be speaking at 3:00pm on the 12th. My talk is titled Living with SQL and NoSQL at craigslist: a Pragmatic Approach. The abstract for the talk is:

craigslist uses a variety of data storage systems in its backend systems: in-memory, SQL, and NoSQL. This talk is an overview of how craigslist works with a focus on the data storage and management choices that were made in each of its major subsystems. These include MySQL, memcached, Redis, MongoDB, Sphinx, and the filesystem. Special attention will be paid to the benefits and tradeoffs associated with choosing from the various popular data storage systems, including long-term viability, support, and ease of integration.

If you’re interested in learning more about our data systems at craigslist, drop by.

Then, on the following day (April 13th), the folks behind Sphinx, Drizzle, and SkySQL are putting on a one-day mini-conference that features speakers on a variety of interesting topics. I’ll be speaking as part of Sphinx Search Day 2012. I’m looking forward to meeting Ivinco there as well.

I don’t yet have an abstract for my Sphinx talk, but it’ll probably be similar to a brown bag talk I recently gave at craigslist. It was an overview of how we’re using a mix “traditional” batch-updating Sphinx and Real-Time Sphinx to power some new features.

Hope to see you there!

Reading There’s no shame in code that is simply “good enough” (and the discussion on hacker news), I find myself strongly agreeing. I have this system I built about 3 years ago at craigslist. Since then it has been extended in various ways and now runs on about four times the hardware it did back then. And it handles far, far more data.

In other words, I’m still evolving it (in small steps) and helping it to grow and change to suit our needs. But every now and then, while reading through the code, I get the urge to “improve” it in some way. Often that means adding a new abstraction “just in case” I need in the future. Or there’s that one script that runs from cron, which is written in bash. I’d love to re-write in Perl. But that’d be more work for virtually no benefit.

Why do I not just make these changes? Two reasons:

1. the stuff works and is stable
2. every time you change something you may also break something

The fact that I can look back on code I wrote a few years ago and identify ways that I’d do it better is good. It means I’m still learning. But the fact that I can successfully resist the urge to change the code is even better.

The quest for perfection is tricky. You can spend a lot of time chasing it and there’s no telling if you’ll every actually get there. And even if you do, what other things did you put aside in the process?

I think this mentality can apply to a of things in life. One of my hopes for 2012 is that I can better see that.