Review

Code reviews are an important instrument to keep the code quality high. There are all kinds of schools on how to do this. For the local.ch frontend we made pre-checkin code reviews mandatory for a few core components including the Okapi framework. For all other components and applications, developers can request code reviews if they wish. For this to work without the developers being annoyed with the process, code reviews must be super-easy. When first starting with code reviews at local.ch I tested a ton of tools. But none of them quite fit our workflow. In the end we went for LodgeIt. LodgeIt is “only” a pastebin application. But it works amazingly well for code reviews because it has some advanced functionality such as replying and then diffing the reply to the original. ...

A short while back the book Building Scalable Web Sites came out on Safari. The book is written by Cal Henderson, one of the main people behind Flickr. As I’m currently involved in building a Web application (local.ch) I was interested to learn a few lessons by the Flickr people. Okay, Flickr is not beating any speed records right now, but it’s still an incredibly big application with tons of users and data. Management review: the book is worth a read. Technical short review: the book covers a lot of stuff a bit and nothing extremely well. The book does not completely live up to it’s title as scaling is only part of the book. It seems more to be a list of lessons learned while building Flickr. That’s also the reason for one of the book’s main deficiencies: it’s mostly PHP and MySQL only. But it also includes enough lessons that can be applied in other environments for it to be useful. A short chapter by chapter review follows. ...