Adam Wiggins, a Heroku co-founder, wrote about startups, scaling teams, and the Unix process model for web apps.
Commenters cite his 'Startup Curve' post and the 'Trough of Sorrow' diagram, and list his blog among good developer blogs.
Define innovative. One major goal of any shell is to get nasty shit done as fast as possible. Conventions accreted over time and breaking those too much diminishes the viability of an alternative project.
rush Ruby Shell [1] might qualify, but it has the problem of any "innovative" shell: different special syntax and doing something so different that the transition curve is too steep for most people.
Zsh is kind of weird because it feels academic with the option of having every feature imaginable AND not having hashes or signatures with releases. The good thing about zsh is that most of it isn't loaded by default. It has modules. It has lots of neat options lacking in other shells such as case-correction and interactive completion. That's all kinds of innovative.
Bash is the mysql of shells. It's pervasive so there's loads of pressure not to innovate.
I would like to see shells' community get more like node by having minimal, focused packages of added functionality that each do one thing well, because having to declare the same primitive functions to do something DRY and useful is a pain.
[1] https://adam.heroku.com/past/2008/2/19/rush_the_ruby_shell/
Using system utilities like cron, can be suboptimal if all you're trying to do is schedule periodic tasks within an application, e.g. database cleanup tasks, periodic polling of other services etc.
The main gripes with cron are:
- cron can be overkill. It requires maintaining a separate crontab file for your app. Wit schedule you can keep everything in pure Python.
- cron is per machine. Multiple app servers require locks of some sort to prevent job duplication. To solve this, we could put triggered jobs on a shared jobqueue (beanstalkc, resque, ...) and have them processed by several workers.
- cron's syntax, while powerful, can be difficult to understand and maintain. Schedule provides an easy to read syntax based on the builder pattern, e.g. "schedule.every(2).hours.do(job, args)"
Much of this was said in better words by Addam Wiggins: http://adam.heroku.com/past/2010/4/13/rethinking_cron/
I wrote schedule because I needed a lightweight scheduling solution for a Python web service backend. It's 'clockwork' (https://github.com/tomykaira/clockwork) for Python.
I'm migrating an old MySQL based app to Postgres at the moment. Heres some of the things I'm looking at in addition to the base tools.
1) taps ( done by some people from Heroku ) : https://github.com/ricardochimal/taps and http://adam.heroku.com/past/2009/2/11/taps_for_easy_database_transfers/
2) mysql2psql : https://github.com/maxlapshin/mysql2postgres
3) Just slurping in the data via the FDW feature for 9.1 , http://www.pgxn.org/dist/mysql_fdw/1.0.0/
http://adam.blog.heroku.com/past/2008/9/3/ddl_transactions/
"MySQL doesn’t support DDL transactions;"
Meaning you can't change the schema transactionally. InnoDB handles data transactions ok, but I hadn't realized that it doesn't handle schema changes. It seems like I'm always discovering some little nasty about Mysql when I am forced to use it.
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog
http://al3x.net
http://www.airs.com/blog
http://tirania.org/blog
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com
http://www.250bpm.com/blog
Definitely http://adam.heroku.com/ too (already mentioned).
A quick Google image search turns up this:
http://adam.heroku.com/past/2008/4/23/the_startup_curve/
The quality isn't great unfortunately. Should be turned into a sculpture or something!