kchodorow

How to Choose a Shard Key: The Card Game

Choosing the right shard key for a MongoDB cluster is critical: a bad choice will make you and your application miserable. Shard Carks is a cooperative strategy game to help you choose a shard key. You can try out a few pre-baked strategies I set up online (I recommend reading this post first, though). Also,Continue reading “How to Choose a Shard Key: The Card Game”

Wireless dongle review

A dongle is a USB thingy (as you can see, I’m very qualified in this area) that lets you connect your computer to the internet wherever you go. It uses the same type of connection your cellphone data plan uses (3G or 4G). A few months ago, Clear asked if they could send me aContinue reading “Wireless dongle review”

Setting Up Your Interview Toolbox

This post covers a couple “toolbox” topics that are easy to brush up on before the technical interview. I recently read a post that drove me nuts, written by someone looking for a job. They said: I can’t seem to crack the on-site coding interviews… [Interviews are geared towards] those who can suavely implement aContinue reading “Setting Up Your Interview Toolbox”

How I Became a Programmer

I started programming when I was 20. My original college plan was to major in mathematics and become a saxophonist (I didn’t feel like starving while I tried to make it as a musician). Luckily, I had a crush on a computer science major so I tagged along with him to a programming team meeting.Continue reading “How I Became a Programmer”

Firesheep: Internet Snooping made Easy

If you use an open wifi network, people around you can see what you’re doing. They not only can look at your accounts, but log in as you with a double click. Even if you’re non-technical (especially if you’re non-technical!) you should know how this works and how to protect your accounts. Here’s what’s happening:Continue reading “Firesheep: Internet Snooping made Easy”

Bending the Oplog to Your Will

Part 3 of the replication internals series: three handy tricks. DIY triggers Using the oplog for crash recovery Creating non-replicated collections This is the third post in a three-part series on replication. See also parts 1 (replication internals) and 2 (getting to know your oplog). DIY triggers MongoDB has a type of query that behavesContinue reading “Bending the Oplog to Your Will”

How not to get a job with a startup

10gen is in super-recruiting mode, trying to scoop up all the great graduates before Google and Microsoft absorb them. I’ve been doing what feels like endless recruiting activities, and I’ve noticed that lot of applicants shoot themselves in the foot. So, here’s what not to do: First contact Don’t: contact the startup before you knowContinue reading “How not to get a job with a startup”

Getting to Know Your Oplog

This is the second in a series of three posts on replication internals. We’ve already covered what’s stored in the oplog, today we’ll take a closer look at what the oplog is and how that affects your application. Our application could do billions of writes and the oplog has to record them all, but weContinue reading “Getting to Know Your Oplog”

Replication Internals

This is the first in a three-part series on how replication works. Replication gives you hot backups, read scaling, and all sorts of other goodness. If you know how it works you can get a lot more out of it, from how it should be configured to what you should monitor to using it directlyContinue reading “Replication Internals”

Scaling, scaling everywhere

Interested in learning more about scaling MongoDB? Pick up September’s issue of PHP|Architect magazine, the database issue! I wrote an article on scaling your MongoDB database: how to choose good indexes, help handle load using replication, and set up sharding correctly (it’s not PHP-specific). If you prefer multimedia, I also did an O’Reilly webcast onContinue reading “Scaling, scaling everywhere”