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Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#71

Post by PStamatiou »

Jekyll (https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll)

First touched it two months ago just to tinker with but didn't really do anything with it. Then after numerous frustrations with my current blogging setup, I spent the last 5 days hacking on it over the holidays and I think it's almost ready to launch. Had to do some custom stuff that I'll write about in a post. It's extremely hackable and I love it. The only thing that doesn't work for me is LSI for related posts. Even with a fast computer and gsl/rb-gsl it still takes 10+ hours with my 1,000+ posts. Anyways, having a super fast site is going to be a breath of fresh air. Google was saying 88% of sites loaded faster than mine ( http://paulstamatiou.com ), though likely due to the images in many of my reviews.

Also installed Google mod_pagespeed and all is well so far.

* Though to be fair most of that is just my redesign that is more minimal, less ads, etc, but there's something extremely attractive about simple, flat files. No worrying about if your database will get corrupted. Everything is in git..

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#72

Post by mark_h »

ctkrohn wrote: post #50
SandB0x wrote: post #4

New to me : Numpy/Scipy. If you're using Matlab you should know there's a Free and worthy Python based alternative

Don't forget Matplotlib. Great-looking visualizations built on top of the Numpy stack.

And don't forget basemap if you're doing anything geospatial. This is an absolute godsend for me, I wish I knew of alternatives in other languages too, but as far as I know there's nothing else like it for that sweet spot of free and awesome ease of use.

(Not that I mind writing in Python of course! It would just be nice to have similar options when python might not be an option)

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#73

Post by schmichael »

beanstalkd

I've worked with MongoDB, Cassandra, and a host of other tools, libraries, databases, and frameworks, but beanstalk is the only one to never fail me. It's not a full swiss army knife like Redis or the sexy app of the year like MongoDB: beanstalk does 1 job and does it, as far as I can tell, perfectly.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#74

Post by spudlyo »

Varnish, the reverse proxy, has been my favorite new-to-me technology of 2010. It sits in front of Apache and caches static content (or anything really) based on rules you define in the Varnish Configuration Language (VCL).

Varnish is cool because it is very fast. It was written by Poul-Henning Kamp, who has a lot of experience in FreeBSD kernel development. He makes effective use of virtual memory, is careful to avoid memory operations that result in expensive bus transactions on mutli CPU systems, and knows how many system calls it takes to serve up a cache hit. All of this work has paid off. Varnish can turn a plodding CMS into a site that screams, and your profiling tools (siege, apache ab) will fall over before the site does.

Of course it helps if your CMS supports cache control headers, and isn't utterly laden with cookies, but that's where the VCL language comes in. You can write code to strip bogus cookies (like google analytics) coming from both the client and the server which vastly improves your cache hit ratios.

I like the way Varnish uses a shared memory pool for statistics and logging -- a wealth of information about the system is available to you but it doesn't generate a ton of I/O logging it to a file unless you ask it to. I love how you can use the telnet admin interface to compile new VCL code into a running system and then switch to it, while keeping old named configurations around in case you need to revert back.

Varnish has really helped me make slow sites fast this year, although it hasn't happened without some VCL coding effort and some understanding of how the sites operate.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#75

Post by ja27 »

This is the first year I've really used the real released Windows 7 - on my new SSD-loaded work laptop and on my personal netbook. It's amazing to see Windows more or less work and do what I want it to do most of the time.

GPU-accelerated VLC on my netbook has been amazing.

I got a Canon T2i / 550D this year. It shoots some amazing HD video and will only get better as I spend more on lenses and develop better techniques.

The Kindle 3 (brighter display and cheap price) have me reading books I've been putting off for years. It's great to have a device that's great at one thing and not very good at random browsing, Facebook, Twitter, HN, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#76

Post by tocomment »

jfoutz wrote: post #10

makerbot cupcake cnc. It was an on again off again sort of project mostly off, but i finished it up a week or two ago. Now I can print plastic in any shape i can draw in art of illusion. It's satisfying fiddling at the computer for a while then printing and having a real 3d thing.

What's some stuff you've printed?

Re: Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?

#77

Post by donniefitz2 »

Normally, I'm a software producer and I've worked with a few technologies that are great, but this year (as of late) I'm becoming a software consumer.

I've finally gotten to experience the Kindle 3 (Christmas gift) and the Google CR-48 is pretty sweet too. I believe the Kindle will change the amount I read. I have so many books on deck. My biggest challenge is balancing development time with watching movie time and more reading time.

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