Noel Rappin Writes Here

This week I wound up trying to put together a sample “real-world” problem suitable for use in an automated web thing aimed at potential new hires. Of course, any actual “real-world” problem would be have too many extraneous details to make it suitable given the constraints of the web thing, but trying to create the illusion of real-world-ness was kind of fun. Since this seemed like sort of a weird way to spend a day or two, I decided to make it weirder by implementing both my solution to the problem and the code to generate test data in a language I don’t use every day.

Top Story and Book Update I have sample cover designs. I don’t think I can show them yet, but I’ve got ‘em, I like them, and hopefully we’ll have picked one to show shortly. Tab dump Not a whole lot today: Here’s a look at the current status of using a non-blocking MySQL driver with Rails. The promise here is for significantly faster database access. Two stories that are related to projects that I worked on back in my EdTech days: