Node.js and The Case of the Blocked Event Loop

In [Pick Your Battles](http://zef.me/4235/pick-your-battles) I listed a few problems that we had in our production deployment of a big node.js codebase. Some people asked me to elaborate on one in particular:

Message Queue-Based Load Balancing

When you run a big mission critical web app, you have to two big challenges on the operational side:

1. Handling _failure_ — failure is all around: servers fail, processes crash, datacenters blow up.
2. _Scaling_ as traffic increases and…

Pick Your Battles

So, you decided to build a real application. Not a toy. Not a hobby project. Something that’s supposed to last, supposed to…

The Innovator’s Challenge

Last week I published an article on [picking battles](http://zef.me/4235/pick-your-battles). When I read comments on twitter, reddit and hacker news, the article was often summarised as “don’t jump on all the new stuff that people invent, stick with what you know and has been in use…

How To Make Remote Work

When we moved to Poland I did not speak a lot of Polish. In fact, I still don’t, but that’s another story. I definitely was not close to the level where I could actually function in an office environment. When it came to finding a job there I had to ask myself: would a Polish software…

Science of Persuation

Amazing video on, well, exactly that: how to persuade people to follow your lead, to buy what you’re selling. 12 very valuable minutes of video everybody should see.

Avoiding JavaScript Pitfalls Through Tree Hugging

Mid-january I have a talk about [treehugger.js](https://github.com/ajaxorg/treehugger) at [MeetJS Summit](http://summit.meetjs.pl). Treehugger is the library I developed for use in Cloud9 for [various code analysis…

The Insane Story of Ithkuil

Few people know that in 2006 I was determined to drop out of computer science completely. After an extremely busy year doing my master’s in networks & distributed systems at [TCD](http://www.tcd.ie) and a decade and a half of programming under my belt, I had enough of it all. I…

Dr. Zef

Last week Wednesday I successfully defended my PhD thesis. Therefore, I am now officially a doctor. I was a little nervous, because you don’t know in advance what questions will be be asked during the defense. However, it was a very nice, friendly defense.