On Why I Still Prefer Traditional Books to eBooks

I’ve been using a Kindle for a long time now, and I love it. But I keep buying paper books. Lots of them. Actually I buy a lot more books than ebooks and it doesn’t even stop there. Admittedly, I am guilty of repeatedly buying paper editions of ebooks I’ve read on the Kindle. For a very long time I’ve not been able to tell the precise reason why I keep going back to traditional books....

December 2, 2013 · Nicola Iarocci

MongoDB and REST API go for a picnic (video and slides)

I had the opportunity to give my RESTful WeB APIs and MongoDB Go For A Picnic talk at both MongoTorino and NoSQL Day. The folks at PUG Friuli where so nice to record all the NoSQL Day sessions, so here you have it: the full length video of yours truly speaking to a fully packed room crowded with 120 very attentive attendees. Unfortunately audio is horrible and while all MongoTorino talks were in english, NoSQL Day was an italian-only event....

November 19, 2013 · Nicola Iarocci

We Are All Remote Workers

A little more than a year ago we closed our offices to become a fully distributed company. This story, which is still unfolding, has been the subject of my We Are All Remote Workers talk at RomagnaCamp 2013.

September 7, 2013 · Nicola Iarocci

My interview on being a MongoDB Master

So I’ve been interviewed by Laura Czajkowski on my experience and role as a MongoDB Master. The interview actually covers more angles than that and I guess that, if you really don’t have anything better to do, you might even want to check it out. How did you get involved in open source? I’ve been an avid developer delivering desktop applications in the .NET/MSSQL closed source ecosystem for so many years that open source wasn’t even on my radar....

September 4, 2013 · Nicola Iarocci

Eve with Python 3.3 Support

Another Eve release is out and I’m particularly proud about it since it brings full Python 3.3 support (among other things). Check out the relevant blog post: Eve 0.0.9 is out!

August 29, 2013 · Nicola Iarocci

The Future of Programming

Bret Victor on Vimeo.

July 31, 2013 · Nicola Iarocci

Excuses for Lazy Coders

Did you check for a virus on your system? You must have the wrong version. It’s a third party application issue. That code was written by the last guy. Programming Excuses. We’ve all been there.

July 30, 2013 · Nicola Iarocci

Free Robust Email Validation API

The guys at Mailgun are taking a very interesting approach at the ever-lasting problem of proper Email validation: Given an arbitrary address this service validates address based off syntax checks (RFC defined grammar), DNS validation, spell checks, and if available, Email ServiceProvider (ESP) specific local-part grammar. They’re relying on formal grammar and not on regex like the rest of us, which is perhaps the more intriguing aspect of the project. Being Email Service Providers themselves they have good knowledge of most ESPs local-part grammars (the left side of the @ symbol) so when there is a match, they’re validating local-parts too....

July 29, 2013 · Nicola Iarocci

Eve v0.0.8 has been released

Most significant features are probably the native support for MongoDB write concern settings, new event hooks allowing for transformation of documents before they are sent to clients, increased handling of both pagination and CORS, and the native validation of float data types. Get it on PyPI, go straight to the source code or more likely, visit the project homepage.

July 25, 2013 · Nicola Iarocci

ORM is an anti-pattern

In ORM is an anti-pattern Laurie Voss concentrates everything I’ve been saying on the ORM plague in all these years. If your project really does not need any relational data features, then ORM will work perfectly for you, but then you have a different problem: you’re using the wrong datastore. The overhead of a relational datastore is enormous; this is a large part of why NoSQL data stores are so much faster....

July 24, 2013 · Nicola Iarocci