Axon Flux is a blog by a Posterous engineer on scaling Rails, startup engineering, NoSQL and web infrastructure.
HN links its post on building and scaling a startup on Rails as a useful scaling resource, plus its Facebook analytics and PHP quotes posts.
I've downvoted you for providing a worthless answer.
The poster asked for similar resources on scaling Rails up; maybe something like https://github.com/blog/117-scaling-lesson-23742 or http://axonflux.com/building-and-scaling-a-startup would have been useful.
I sincerely doubt that the top-poster has Twitter-level problems or resources. He may have a Rails site that's crapping out under load, and needs resources for optimizing both application performance and database access.
"Just move everything to Java" is a meaningless answer. It doesn't help him at all, not unless he's got a year and change to retrain/rehire his engineers and completely rebuild his application.
I like his quotes:
> I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I'll just restart apache every 10 requests.
> I was really, really bad at writing parsers. I still am really bad at writing parsers. We have things like protected properties. We have abstract methods. We have all this stuff that your computer science teacher told you you should be using. I don't care about this crap at all.
(from http://axonflux.com/5-quotes-by-the-creator-of-php-rasmus-lerdorf)
This is ongoing in the PHP community. For those who like purity there are tons and tons of wrapper classes that hide all that stuff away.
Modern IDEs autocomplete all the functions, I'm using PHPStorm and as soon as I type 'arr' it shows me a list of all the array functions with parameters listed.
Not perfect, but if I was worried about that kind of thing I'd use Python (which I love) or RoR (which I also love).
The ethos of PHP is to just get stuff done: http://axonflux.com/5-quotes-by-the-creator-of-php-rasmus-lerdorf
The work to derive the palette? Do you mean RGB to HSL and back? That isn't particularly CPU-intensive.
One of many implementations: http://axonflux.com/handy-rgb-to-hsl-and-rgb-to-hsv-color-model-c
I imagine you could precompute the entire 24 bit range if you really wanted.
I mean, this thing has a failure mode where it says it can't find your IP address. That makes no sense until you look at how it was implemented.
Reason: Most .NET/PHP-programmers just don't care about readable code nor security per definition; it's strongly bound to the reason they picked this language from the start.
...or to quote the creator of PHP: http://axonflux.com/5-quotes-by-the-creator-of-php-rasmus-lerdorf
Check out this post from one of the founders at Posterous:
http://axonflux.com/building-and-scaling-a-startup