Plain old utility

Christopher Haupt offers a gentle introduction to refactoring your project's utility JavaScript into jQuery plugins.

"A high degree of chattiness"

Daniel Jacobson of Netflix explores strategies for coping with the explosive growth in API requests.

...we will also be looking at ways to handle partial response through the API. Our goal in this approach will be to conceptualize the API as a database.... We want the API to be able to answer questions with the same degree of variability that SQL can for a database.

What did I do?

Wright Bryan is generous with the credits for Wednesday's update to the Shots blog. I did some back-end work, but I also (for once) worked on a module that you can see in the final product: I wrote the Perl script that scrapes links from Scott Hensley's Tweeted Times topics and drops them into the right-rail "popular news from the field" sections of the mega-category pages, like this one. Marc provided the insights; Todd and David W. provided the style.

League tables

Andrew Binstock analyzes this year's release of the TIOBE Programming Community Index, a rough and ready measure of programming language popularity based on search engine hits. Bubbling under the hot 10, Ada and RPG are resurgent. Either that, or the methodology still needs some tweaking. At position 44 on the chart, PL/I is tanned, rested, and ready for its comeback.