Salesforce Architecture — Our search tier runs on commodity Linux hosts, each of which is augmented with a 640 GiB PCI-E flash drive which serves as a caching layer for search requests. These hosts get their data from a shared SAN array via an NFS file system. Search indexes are stored on the flash drive to enable greater performance for search throughput. Architecture porn.
Humanize (Github) — Javascript to turn “first” into a list position, format numbers, generate plurals in English, etc. (via Pete Warden)
Users vs Apps (Tim Bray) — the wrong thing being shared with the wrong people, even once, can ruin a trust relationship forever. Personally, I’m pretty hard-line about this one. I’m currently refusing to update the Android app from my bank, CIBC, because it wants access to my contacts. You know what the right amount of “social” content is in my relationship with my bank? Zero, that’s what.