Michael Smedberg

When your webapp is serving up content that’s expensive to generate, you may want to serve it up asynchronously- via AJAX calls. This is particularly appealing when content is “below the fold.” However when that content is cached, you want to serve it up as quickly as possible. If you’ve already calculated the content, you’d

Varnish is a high performance, flexible, open source HTTP accelerator. We started using Varnish at Redfin in our last major release, a few weeks ago. It’s pretty much invisible to our end users, but we’re so happy with it that we wanted to give the folks who made Varnish their props in public. It has

In Hibernate, when you indicate that a domain object should not support lazy proxies, you make it hard for DAO writers to get their code to perform well. Worse, you disable a capability that they may be counting on, and they may not notice until there are major performance problems. Unless you have a good reason to, use “@Proxy(lazy = true)” on your domain objects.

vs. Redfin recently switched some of our backend DB infrastructure from MySQL to Postgres, and we plan to wholly switch to Postgres in the near future. This wasn’t an easy decision; MySQL has a lot going for it, and switching has been a lot of work. However, we’ve already seen major benefits from choosing Postgres,

Writing rich date/time features in a web app can be a pain. Apps (such as schedulers) that do math on times (e.g. ordering times) should pay attention to time zones for those times, but it’s difficult to know which time zone should be used to display the times to the user. Asking the user to