However, I do want to talk about one gotcha and one thing you should think about.

The Gotcha: Possible Message Failure

Messages in Resque are not necessarily going to run. There is an, admittedly edge, case where a worker can pop a message off of a queue and then die. The message never gets put in a fail queue and it never actually runs. The message is gone. I have a fork that fixes this (makes it so messages can’t be lost unless Redis loses ‘em) https://github.com/tobowers/resque. However, that’s awaiting a merge.

Until my branch (or some other fix) gets merged, make sure you think about what’s going to happen if your job doesn’t run. For many apps this can be “ok” (since it won’t happen very often). Just make sure it’s OK for yours.

One Thing You Should Think About: Tracking Message State

Since you can’t reach into a Resque queue and say “talk to me about this job,” tracking message state is up to your application. We happen to do this in our database.

We put a “job” record into the database with body, result, state columns. The body is there so we can always re-create a message from the database if something goes wrong. The result keeps track of what happened and the state lets us track it along its merry way.

If you have to make absolutely sure that your messages get processed, you’ll have to think about how you’re using Resque.

The piece comes across a little “woe is me.” Which I find strange. The tech industry that I know and love isn’t hurting at all. However, as the article states, the mediocre development jobs and the grunt work is being shipped overseas. That’s good for America and American developers.

This particular paragraph in the article kind of sums it up (I think):

Ms. Mann said, that an employer has sent her job abroad since she received her master’s in computer science more than two decades ago; the last time was in 2001. This week she starts a yearlong program to upgrade her programming skills, paid for by a federal program that assists workers who have been displaced by international trade.

The tech industry is so wide open for positions right now. Companies are scrambling to find the best talent and it’s incredibly difficult to find excellent developers. Software development also has vastly greater resources available to the self starter than many other industries.

All it takes to become an excellent developer is to decide on something to learn, and go learn it. You probably don’t even have to buy a book. In general, the communities are very supportive of “newbs” and there are tons of open source projects that you could work on to provide you with “something real.”

In any industry, if you “show up for your job, work a little, and then leave” you will probably be out of a job. There are hungry, passionate people all over the world that want your job. The good news is that if you care about what you do, constantly learn, and adapt then it will be impossible to ship your job overseas.

All it takes is to love your job. Do that – and I bet you keep it.

Also: read Linchpin

Meetings are for brain storming and/or getting to know someone (or a group of people).

Anything else and you should strongly consider why you just spent all that money to have a meeting.

Anyone else have any other ideas for good meetings? In this context I’m not considering a conference or a talk a meeting.

However, if your immediate team is bigger than 10-15 people and/or doesn’t involve UI and business people, or you use gantt charts, or you don’t actively work with people from all disciplines…

You’re probably doing it wrong.

Unless of course your company only involves yourself.

I did have one problem that after reading several articles I would keep getting a white screen. I have hundreds of feeds with thousands of articles and interrupted a sync – so maybe that was the cause.

The app is so good I missed two subway stops on the way to work. Woops! But I recommend anyone who has an iPhone and a Google Reader account to get this app.

I am in no way affiliated with the Byline team.

UPDATE:
If you are seeing a repeating error in Safari and Chrome – it’s ok. It’s an ignorable error. If you can’t use login or prompt for permissions – it’s probably because (as stated above) those have to come from a click, double click, etc… some sort of user interaction.

I love the *looks* of the new Facebook javascript API. It’s got one major flaw though. It doesn’t work in Safari or Chrome. I have an app setup to use http://localhost:7000/ as the connect url and everything works *great* in Firefox. Things even work mostly ok in safari or chrome… but as soon as you try to launch the permissions dialog box you get the browser cycling through “unsafe javascript attempt to access frame with URL.”

Best part about this whole thing is: the facebook developer forums throw the *same* error.

Also, when I try to create an account on the forums (not using facebook connect) I get a “cannot connect to socket” error.

I guess I go back to their older clunkier API? Seems to be a number of complaints but no answers from Facebook.

http://croonmytune.com

or read about it here: http://jumpcanopy.com/?p=21

Then I came across this article: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1249282/set-method-to-put-in-rails-xml-requests

So... if you're using prototype your "put" methods look something like this:

You can skip the last 10 minutes or so when he dives into this odd crazy future... but the beginning part really makes you think about how you can add game theory to any business you're in. I really like the idea of experience points and leveling up for class. That's something any event-based business could really get into.

h/t Andrew Holz. via fury.com