Skis / Toys / Fun

I’m not really going to rant against relational databases, but this is more thinking about why technologies like CouchDB and SimpleDB are useful.

Some quick reference note:

• Amazon SimpleDB and CouchDB compared
• Eventual Consistency Is Not That Scarry
• Falling Walls – VC view

Many things can be said about databases but it’s the problem space that they are trying to tackle.  If you look at applications like Wikipedia you have to wonder why you need a database to manage the content.  Think about the objects that wikipedia manages:

• Page content
• User
• Page permissions
• Edit history
• Inter page links
• … yes there’s a whole bunch more tables in MediaWiki …

Lets think about this for a second here, for account creation or other user oriented activites you need a transactional database to make sure your user objects are up to date — when you create an account you really want to have a single account created and active.  When you edit a page, you personally want to see the edits but if it takes 10 minutes for the world to see the edit’s it’s probably not a big deal.  Though of course if somebody else attempts to edit, you want to make sure they’ve got the edits out..

..put this down for two days… posting just to mark the links for posterity…

A few years ago I spent a winter taking EMT classes to become an EMT…  One idea at the time was to hang out being ski patrol, but the hours that ski patrol works is not “family friendly”.  Getting out to the mountain way early to help setup and then late to help take down, it might have been fun, but not something that fits life at the moment.

Now we’re into the 2007-2008 ski season and I’m going to do something a little more family friendly… Ski instruction.  The first step of course is getting attached to a mountain such that I can take all of the PSIA courses.  That’s how I just spent the last four days of last week.

Day 1 – 12:00 – 3:00 – Information overload, group of about 40 people sitting down to orientation and getting some general background.  Then it’s off to learn the basic procedures for the children’s center.   From 4:00 to 7:00 it was a general mountain orientation from HR (e.g. the CYA talk about harassment, discrimination, etc, etc.)

Day 2 – 9:00 – 4:00 – one full workday…  Huge amount of detail about how the children center operates, from the three year old room, the 4-6 year olds and the 7-12 year olds.  All good, but somewhere during the day my head exploded and much of the information started drifting out, so we’ll see how it goes on the first few days.

Day 3 – 9:00 – 4:00 – finally got to bring our skis to the mountain!   This was probably the best day, not only did we get a few fun runs in but the content was focused on “how a beginner sees the hill”.  It’s pretty amazing how your perspective changes as you’re skill improves.  Covered alot about adults and kids and how to teach them.

Day 4 – 9:30 – 4:00 – Shadowing… spent the day with a group of 4-6 year olds (level 2 skiers).  This really help re-enforce the bits that were learned on day 3, also got a change to talk about a whole bunch of details..