Excellent Localmemcache

Yesterday’s Munich on Rails meetup was the usual mix of interesting talks and geeky, delightful conversations. When I say “usual”, I of course mean it’s been the kind of evening I by now kind of expect. ;) Many thanks to Roland for organizing and the Experteers guys for the venue and the food. Nom!

Anyways: interesting talks.

Marco Otte-Witte presented his Excellent gem (gotta love the name) for static code analysis. It’s mostly aimed towards checking Rails code for smell, although —and he made that clear— it’s not targetted at people who strive for the blissful state of “zero warnings”. It’s more relaxed in that way; merely showing you unusual (or stupid or silly) parts of your code, such as missing validations in your models or having instance variables in your partials and the likes. Sadly, at the moment it’s not dealing with HAML templates yet, just ERB. (He’s looking for volunteers, by the way.;)) Here are the slides:

I can actually see myself using it.

And then Sven C. Koehler presented his somewhat irritatingly named¹ yet spiffy Localmemcache. It’s a local, shared-memory-based, persistent key/value store, which looks pretty fascinating. I was a wee bit confused by it until it finally clicked — you wouldn’t be able to tell from its name, but it’s not related to memcached. Aha! It’s a C library with Ruby bindings which offers a more or less simple storage system (values are of the type String, but of course that would include Marshal‘ed data) and apparently blazingly fast — his benchmarks showed that Localmemcache is almost as fast as accessing native Ruby hashes. Its not for everyone —for example, as I understand, it requires a 64-bit Unix system— but it looks like a pretty interesting alternative to memcached for single-machine setups like, say, your single production machine or your local dev box. This should ease the issue of sharing data between different Ruby processes, for example. I’m definitely going to check that out.

Oh, and Peter Schrammel presented a concept for a truly private asset server. As I’m not entirely sure whether this is really public information yet, I’ll keep my yapper shut here. :)

Afterwards we all headed to the Park Café for conversations and drinks. All in all a very nice evening, even though I was still a bit groggy from the day before — the München Twittwoch. (Which reminds me, I should probably whip up a quick post about that as well. Eh.)

Again: my thanks go to the MoR organizers and all the people who showed up, I had a good time. :)

Update: Artikel von Marco zu Excellent auf RailsMagazin.de

On Communities

After building community sites for a while by now I think I have grasped the social dynamics blueprint of community sites to some degree. For example: most community-centered sites are starting out small (naturally), then gathering a relatively small loyal following (#1), then gaining momentum (#2), attracting more and more regulars (#3) and — after a while — die (#4). The circle of life, so to speak. But the devil’s in the details. Let’s take a look at how it works (according to me):

1. The small loyal following. People find the site through different channels; they like the concept, the idea, identify with it and decide to stick to it. Everyone knows everyone else, fuzzy feelings ensue, good place to hang out.
2. Gaining momentum. The regulars tell their friends who come to check it out, are heartily welcomed by the existing users who like to see their beloved site to bloom. They believe in the site for a number of reason, that’s why they hang out there all the time. There’s a feeling of going forward, of reaching out to the sky.
3. Attracting more and more regulars. Too many people to know everyone, the old sense of community is somewhat lost in the site’s process of growing. With the flood of new people joining there are a couple of black sheep (read: trolls and fuckwads) who get an utterly moronic kick out of annoying people for one reason or the other.
4. Death of the site. The oldtimers have lost the faith in the site after seeing it go down the drain, after literally feeling the sense of quality, both in people and content. It’s just not the same anymore. A few hardcore believers try to stay and smooth the waves but the majority doesn’t care anymore, and their voices don’t have the same weight anymore. Too many people, it’s like the paradise is lost in a sea of tourists. The oldtimers leave, with them goes the old spirit of the site, the very soul of it, the maintainers get desillusioned, start to drink and close the site, having lost their faith in mankind.

Personally I think this life cycle is bound to happen to every community site on this planet. Sooner or later, doesn’t matter, the Community Reaper is going to get them/us all. My belief.