Simon Willison’s Weblog

What’s New In Python 3.1. Lots of stuff, but the best bits are an ordered dictionary type (congrats, Armin), a Counter class for counting unique items in an iterable (I do this on an almost daily basis) and a bunch of performance improvements including a rewrite of the Python 3.0 IO system in C.

# 3:02 pm / python, python3, python31, performance, releases, armin-ronacher

BashReduce. Map/Reduce in Bash is no longer a joke project (if it ever was)—Richard Crowley is extending it and using it for analysis at OpenDNS.

# 3:03 pm / mapreduce, bash, bashreduce, richard-crowley, opendns

Twitter, an Evolving Architecture. The most detailed write-up of Twitter’s current architecture I’ve seen, explaining the four layers of cache (all memcached) used by the Twitter API.

# 3:09 pm / caching, twitter, memcached, architecture

cache-money. A “write-through caching library for ActiveRecord”, maintained by Nick Kallen from Twitter. Queries hit memcached first, and caches are automatically kept up-to-date when objects are created, updated and deleted. Only some queries are supported—joins and comparisons won’t hit the cache, for example.

# 3:17 pm / activerecord, caching, rails, twitter, cachemoney, memcached