Alexander Williams

The interviewer hauled out FizzBuzz and asked to solve it. It took a minute to stop laughing.

we totally xkcd'ed someone tonight: so she goes in to the cafe and goes up to the guy and says "excuse me, but are you programming in ruby?" and the guy goes, "huh? what? yes, i am." and rene says, more...

Here’s why radix tries are cool: Search performance varies with the key size. More importantly, radix tries give you lexicographic matching.

There’s an interesting kerfluffle going on regarding the scaling woes that Twitter.com is going through, especially since it’s built on Ruby On Rails. Here’s the original interview with one of the Twitter coders, the somewhat evasive reply by the lead more...

Does C# 3.0 Beat Dynamic Languages at their Own Game?

"With Skynet, one can easily convert a time-consuming serial task, such as a computationally expensive Rails migration, into a distributed program running on many computers."

Twitter started as a side project and blew up fast, going from 0 to millions of page views within a few terrifying months. Early design decisions that worked well in the small melted under the crush of new users chirping more...