Category Archives: tech

05 Dec
2011

Importing and Exporting MongoDB Databases

I’m enjoying working with MongoDB but as with any new technology, it can take a little while to find your way around all the tools related to that stack. In particular, I found myself wondering how do I mysqldump for mongodb?

It should have come as no surprise that the command I wanted was called mongodump, really! Continue reading →

29 Nov
2011

Do-it-Yourself Peer Review

When I get asked about tools for quality assurance, I will pretty much always mention that the technology is not the answer. In my experience, the best improvements in quality come from process, from letting as many people as possible have access to all aspects of the system as early and often as possible (this is exactly why evolving projects “release early, release often”). A great tactic is to have another developer review each change – but what do you do if, like me, you work alone? Continue reading →
24 Nov
2011

Explaining MySQL’s EXPLAIN

The MySQL explain plan is a great tool to help developers and database administrators to improve the performance of specific queries happening against a database. It is very easy to use, but its output can be confusing, so I thought I’d show a very simple example. Continue reading →
10 Nov
2011

Simple CRUD with MongoDB

When I meet a new technology, I like to experience it “just as it comes”. I’m happy at the command line and I like to type actual commands and see man pages before I use any wrappers or helper tools. So when I met MongoDB for the first time, I did exactly that. This post shows those first steps of creating a database, and inserting, reading, deleting and updating data.
Continue reading →
03 Nov
2011

API Serving JSONP

disclaimer: I am not a client-side developer, and I don’t write javascript. However I am committed to supplying useful APIs of all kinds, and JSONP falls into this category

Early in the development of the new Joind.In API, someone else started consuming the service to populate the javascript widgets they were making*. Since these scripts are intended to be used on many external pages, and they retrieve data from the joind.in API, cross-domain issues were a problem. Continue reading →

07 Oct
2011

Ada Lovlace Day: Laura Thomson

Happy Ada Lovelace Day! Today we celebrate geeky female role models, and I’m going to write about someone I consider a friend. It feels a bit strange to do so (and I didn’t actually tell her beforehand), however having been written about before on this special day, I know I’ve never been offended by such flattery and so I hope she won’t be either :)
Continue reading →
22 Sep
2011

QR Codes with Google Charts API

I’m a big fan of the google charts API – it draws much better-looking graphs than I would ever manage and all I have to do is assemble the right URL to make it work. I recently got a feature request to add QR codes to joind.in, so that speakers and event admins could easily allow people to link in to a particular talk page.
Continue reading →