A bit ago I wrote a posting about how I left Dropbox and Google drive for a new service called Bitcasa, sadly all good things come to an end. I can no longer recommend Bitcasa because of the change in their service and plans. When I signed up and got the service they still had an unlimited plan that would let you store as much as you wanted. One of the features that I really liked was the need to not have everything sync to your computer, your files would stream over the internet when you wanted them.

One of the things I forgot to talk about in my last posting was the use of MessagePack. MessagePack is a library that lets you take objects and convert them into something much smaller than JSON. Some people have reported using MessagePack and have saved up to 50% of space over JSON. That’s not a bad saving for just using a library. In my example, I wasn’t dealing with any objects that was too complex but there is still a benefit of using MessagePack.

One of the things I find myself always looking into and being excited about is scaling out systems. Now this means different things to different people. The reason for me looking into RPC is how to deal with Microservices as part of a way to move Monolithic applications to into the Microservices architecture. RPC (or Remote procedure call) is an idea that has been in computer science for a bit now.

So I decided to order the Amazon Fire TV, and it arrived yesterday. (Got to love Amazon Prime for shipping!). So this is my first impressions along with why I decided to get the Fire TV. Currently I have an Apple TV second generation, which only supports up to 720p resolution and is kind of dated at this point as far as hardware. I enjoy the Apple TV and find that it’s a great product at a nice price range.

If you have looked over a number of my postings, you can tell that I enjoy playing around with noSQL databases but for this posting I wanted to look at something a bit lower level. LevelDB is a on-disk key/value store that is written by Google. It’s based on concepts from Google’s BigTable database system without sharing any of the code. You can think of LevelDB in the same way as something like SQLite.

If you’ve read any significant amount of my blog you’ve probably realized that I’m fascinated with programming languages; more precisely the syntax, the community, and the purpose of the language. Elixir happens to be one of these languages that has recently caught my attention. I love the ideas functional programming brings and how you to solve problems as a result of those ideas. One of the things that functional programming is helping people to solve is how to get the most out of systems that have multiple cores.

I no longer recommend Bitcasa I was a heavy user of both Dropbox and Google Drive, I had all my work files on Dropbox and all my media and random photos on Google Drive. Totaling around around 100GB of data between the both of them. For the most part this worked out well, but as time when on I did encounter some issues. The first issue was space, Both Dropbox and Google Drive limit you on how much data you can store.

As a developer I keep an eye on the noSQL space. I feel that noSQL truly empowers the developer to do more than using a relational database. They are typically easier to set up and to scale along with an ability to have a looser data structure which is able to evolve overtime. Don’t get me wrong, relational databases have their place and will continue to be used many years from now, but just like using a new language or framework, developers can get a boost from using noSQL databases without having the restraints that come along with using a relational database.

As more developers focus on working on the front end, more tools are created to assist the developers. We now have some great tools and IDEs to help us with our development of JavaScript. The language itself can be hard to grasp and leads to many errors and bugs in your code. New languages for the web have been emerging to help tackle the issues that people are having with building scalable JavaScript applications.

I’m primarily a Software Developer but I still have a great passion for System Administration. I work with Linux based systems now but if you look at some of my older postings you will find that I have done some work on FreeBSD and OpenSolaris. One of the things that really drove me to FreeBSD and OpenSolaris was their idea of Operating system-level virtualization, FreeBSD with Jails and OpenSolaris with Zones.