How To Redis

We’ve covered some good ground already, some blabber about Redis in general, and also some thoughts on when using it could be beneficial. The other big question is: How do I integrate that stuff in my application? How do I get my objects to be stored neatly in Redis?

When To Redis

A very valid question is: What’s a good use case for Redis? There’s quite a few, as Redis isn’t your every day key-value store, it allows you to keeps lists and sets in your datastore, and to run atomic operations on them, like pushing and popping elements. All that stuff is incredibly fast, as obviously your data is held in memory and only persisted to the hard disk if necessary and to top it off, asynchronously, while not reducing the throughput of the server itself.

There’s Something About Redis

I like to think that there’s never been a more exciting time when it comes to playing with new technologies. Sure, that’s a bit selfish, but that’s just how I feel. Doing Java after I got my diploma was interesting, but it wasn’t exciting. Definitely not compared to the tools that keep popping up everywhere.

The Shoulda RSpec Extravaganza

I don’t use RSpec a lot any more these days. I much prefer Shoulda, heck I even started using Rails integration tests again (using Shoulda of course), because sometimes the additional abstraction of Cucumber is just too much. Any way, there’s some things I liked about RSpec, and they were not related to the features of the testing DSL itself, but more to the tool RSpec. It has a neat formatter that’ll output the ten slowest-running tests. I also found the colored list of full test names to be very helpful.

How Not To Design An API

I’ve had the dubious pleasure of working with a certain library. It’s a layer to talk to most of the Amazon Web Services APIs. While working with web services usually is a particular awful experience, this library doesn’t make much of an effort to hide their awkwardness, in fact, in some ways it even makes it worse. It’s pretty old news that I enjoy bitching about code I don’t like, but I also like to keep it positive in at least thinking about how it could be improved.