redbar0n

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't real

Design in the Small

Don't design a Model to be coupled to an API
Create a Service that talks to both your Model and the API

Service Wrapper Record

You have services, stateless objects that talk to the application
You have records, objects that talk to the database
And you have Wrappers, a thin class for a narrow interface to an API

The Problem

If you have installed the standalone Command Line Tools for XCode on your Mac (i.e. without having XCode.app installed), some of these tools can get a bit confused due to a couple of oversights on Apple's part in finalising the setup.

Note: all commands below will need to be run from an Administrator account, or by an account with appropriate permission in /etc/sudoers.

The Solution

1. Failing to Find Frameworks

Sometime when compiling against the preinstalled Frameworks (e.g. Ruby or Python), various tools will inexplicable fail to find header files that are quite clearly there. This is caused by the fact that no XCode has been selected for the command-line tools. Wait, I hear you cry, I don't have XCode installed! Indeed, but you nonetheless need to select one, and point it somewhere where the command line tools exist, like so

	;variants of the code from point #2 of:
	; http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/12/01/Clojure-Theses

	;original

	(apply merge-with +
	(pmap count-lines
	(partition-all batch-size
	(line-seq (reader filename)))))

	class InputOutput
	def initialize(&action)
	@action = action
	end
	private_class_method :new

	# return :: (Monad m) => a -> m a
	def self.unit(x)
	new { x }
	end

	# Resize selenium browser window to avoid Selenium::WebDriver::Error::MoveTargetOutOfBoundsError errors
	#
	# Example usage with Rspec (in spec/support/spec_helper.rb):
	#
	# config.before(:each) do
	# set_selenium_window_size(1250, 800) if Capybara.current_driver == :selenium
	# end
	#
	def set_selenium_window_size(width, height)
	window = Capybara.current_session.current_window.resize_to

	# Option defaults
	OPT="value"

	# getopts string
	# This string needs to be updated with the single character options (e.g. -f)
	opts="fvo:"

	# Gets the command name without path
	cmd(){ echo `basename $0`; }

	function UndoItem (perform, data) {
	this.perform = perform;
	this.data = data;
	}

	/**
	* UndoStack:
	* Easy undo-redo in JavaScript.
	**/

	#Ruby alternatives for parsing CSV files

	# Ruby String#split (slow)
	# Ruby CSV (slow)
	# FasterCSV (ok, recommended)
	# ccsv (fast & recommended if you have control over CSV format)
	# CSVScan (fast & recommended if you have control over CSV format)
	# Excelsior (fast & recommended if you have control over CSV format)

	#CSV library benchmarks can be found here and here

	# initializers/savon.rb

	# Savon Global configuration
	Savon.configure do \|config\|
	config.log = true
	config.log_level = :debug
	config.logger = Rails.logger
	config.env_namespace = :soapenv
	end