What new tools and technologies you learnt recently are worth it?
My answer to What new tools and technologies you learnt recently are worth it? on Quora
Redis: http://simonwillison.net/2009/Oc... and http://simonwillison.net/static/...
It’s an in-memory datastructure server—like memcached, but with persistence and with extremely fast atomic operations against sets, lists and hashes. You can use it to build things on a cheap VPS that you couldn’t build before.
Node.js: http://simonwillison.net/2009/No...
There are lots of async networking frameworks (Twisted for Python, EventMachine for Ruby etc) but Node.js uses V8 JavaScript and offers a completely clean slate in terms of libraries. The community around it is fascinating, and it’s brilliant for things like Comet, WebSocket, consuming the Twitter Streaming API, proxies, WebHooks... it’s a scalable HTTP and IO toolkit and there are a ton of things I can build with it that would have been a lot harder to build without it.