We use Solr as our search engine for one of our internal systems. It has been awesome; before, we had to deal with very messy sql statements to support many search criteria. Solr allows us to stick our denormalized data into an index and search on an arbitrary number of fields via an elegant, RESTful interface. It’s extremely fast, easy to use, and easy to scale. I wanted to share some lessons learned from our experience with Solr.
Solr: Improving Performance and Other Considerations
November 29th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
Data Modeling at Scale: MongoDb + Mongoid, Callbacks, and Denormalizing Data for Efficiency
August 11th, 2011 § 2 comments § permalink
I found myself confronted with a MongoDb data modeling problem. I have your vanilla User model which has many Items. The exact nature of an Item is irrelevant, but let us say a User can have lots of Items. I struggled with trying to figure out how to model this data in a flexible way while still leveraging the documented-orientated nature of MongoDb. The answer may seem obvious to some but it is interesting to weigh the options available.
Nina, My New Favorite Web (Micro)Framework
May 10th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
One of the things I’m excited to see is the huge increase in Open Source projects in the .NET world. NuGet has certainly helped the recent explosion, but even before that there have been numerous projects gaining legs in the .NET community. Even better, the movement has been learning from other programming ecosystems to bring some great functionality into all kinds of .NET based systems.
Updated MVC3 Html5 Boilerplate Template: Now with Twitter and Facebook
March 21st, 2011 § 2 comments § permalink
I pushed a major update to the MVC3/Html5 Boilerplate Template found on the github page. The new update includes the latest boilerplate code and uses the DotnetOpenAuth CTP for logging in via Twitter and Facebook. Thanks to @jacob4u2 for making some necessary web.config changes (he has an alternate template on his bitbucket site you should also check out.
Quicktip: Use Negative Margins with CSS Transforms to Fix Clipping
March 2nd, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
I’ve been playing around with CSS Transforms and had an annoying issue: when rotating divs at an angle, the edge of the div also rotated leaving a gap where I didn’t want one. See the pic: