This is a follow-up from a previous post.
When Zed retired ZSFA, he replaced his most notorious rant with a plea to find someone else to look up to. Not someone loud, brash and arrogant, someone gentle. For me, this is Bob Ippolito.
His name first stuck last December when I was playing around with some Erlang. Bob is the author of mochiweb, an Erlang library for building lightweight HTTP servers. It's what Facebook used to build Facebook Chat. Since I was just starting to learn Erlang, this video of Bob talking Erlang basics was a big help.
I haven't done any Erlang since December but his name kept popping up anyway. I was checking out Tokyo Cabinet and found that Bob had written the Python client for the Tokyo Tyrant protocol.
Recently, he gave an absolutely excellent talk summarizing the current state-of-the-open-source-art in database alternatives. This video is highly worth your time and highscalability's notes on the talk are also quite excellent.
The talk itself was great, but so was the way he handled the "questions", especially the one where the guy tried to fight him on CouchDB. The question asker would comment on some future work to be "coming soon" or try to downplay the importance of the drawback. Bob simply calmly explained the basic facts of the problem at hand and how the current approach taken by CouchDB was fundamentally flawed for his use case along with how and why MongoDB would work better for what he needs to do.
Having just the facts about what the product was designed for and what its pitfalls are was a refreshing contrast to the usual tunnel vision people have where they first decide they like a software product (mysql is the best! let's use it for everything!), shoehorn it into doing things it wasn't designed for (instead of using a message queue like RabbitMQ or Beanstalkd, let's write to a mysql table and empty it by cron job! (Mike Malone did this at pownce (Ghetto queue: slide 57) and I'm guilty of it too)) and then go around giving presentations on how their hack works, thereby trying to validate the idea that their favourite tool should be used for everything all the time. Fred Brooks would be not be proud of us, but he'd probably like Bob's presentation.
