kchodorow

Introducing Noodlin – A Brainstorming App

I’ve been working on a web app, Noodlin, for brainstorming online. Basically, Noodlin just lets you create notes and connect them. I’ve been using it for taking notes during meetings, figuring out who gets what for the holidays, and organizing The Definitive Guide. I think it might be handy for people studying for finals thisContinue reading “Introducing Noodlin – A Brainstorming App”

MongoDB changing default: now write errors are reported

I’m really happy to share that, in a coordinated effort, all official MongoDB drivers are changing their defaults to return a response from writes today. I think that this is kind of a turning point: MongoDB is finally “newbie safe.” You can just spin up a mongod and it’ll default to journaling being on. ThenContinue reading “MongoDB changing default: now write errors are reported”

TDG Update

I just hit 300 pages! (O’Reilly has a nice system where it automatically compiles my XML into a PDF, so I can obsessively check page count). The last edition topped out at just over 200 pages, which was nice: you could actually sit down and read the thing in a reasonable amount of time andContinue reading “TDG Update”

Got any advice?

I was interviewing an potential summer intern yesterday (hey college students, apply to be an intern at 10gen!) and at the end she asked me, “I’ve never been interviewed by a female programmer before. Do you have any advice for me, being a female in a computer science?” I had no idea what to tellContinue reading “Got any advice?”

How MongoDB’s Journaling Works

I was working on a section on the gooey innards of journaling for The Definitive Guide, but then I realized it’s an implementation detail that most people won’t care about. However, I had all of these nice diagrams just laying around. Good idea, Patrick! So, how does journaling work? Your disk has your data filesContinue reading “How MongoDB’s Journaling Works”

Go Get a Hot Water Bottle

If you don’t own one, go order an old-school hot water bottle. You can get one on Amazon for ~$10 and they feel amazing when you have a fever and your feet are freezing. They are also super-easy to use: just fill it up with hot tap water and they let out a nice evenContinue reading “Go Get a Hot Water Bottle”

––thursday #7: git-new-workdir

Often I’ll fix a bug (call it “bug A”), kick off some tests, and then get stuck. I’d like to start working on bug B, but I can’t because the tests are running and I don’t want to change the repo while they’re going. Luckily, there’s a git tool for that: git-new-workdir. It basically createsContinue reading “––thursday #7: git-new-workdir”

How to Make Your First MongoDB Commit

10gen is hiring a lot of people straight out of college, so I thought this guide would be useful. Basically, the idea is: you have found and fixed a bug (so you’ve cloned the mongo repository, created a branch named SERVER-1234, and committed your change on it). You’ve had your fix code-reviewed (this page isContinue reading “How to Make Your First MongoDB Commit”

A Neat C Preprocessor Trick

I’ve been looking at Clang and they define lexer tokens in a way that I thought was clever. The challenge is: how do you keep a single list of language tokens but use them as both an enum and a list of strings? Clang defines C token types in a file, TokenKinds.def, with all ofContinue reading “A Neat C Preprocessor Trick”

Call for Schemas

I just started working on MongoDB: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition! I’m planning to add: Lots of ops info Real-world schema design examples Coverage of new features since 2010… so quite a few However, I need your help on the schema design part! I want to include some real-world schemas people have used and whyContinue reading “Call for Schemas”