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I have a theory about this stuff. Some programmers who need to "blow off" a day here or there spend it by lounging around on the sofa playing video games. I don't mean to rag on gamers because I'm one myself, but the point is I'm fascinated by the fact that many video games are also "mental challenges" that are similar in several ways to computer programming and use similar parts of the brain. What factor(s) then make the game-play enjoyable while the heavy-lifting dev-work feels sometimes more tedious ? Maybe there is a way to adjust our methodology to feel more game-like, relaxing, and fun.

I think I've actually stumbled upon a way to do this, allow me to explain: If you start to read about the statistics around social dynamics in MMORPG games then certain things fall out of the data, and game makers have picked up on these ideas and used them to make their games more fun and addictive, and I think these same insights can be applied to organize software development.

Lets start with World of Warcarft. The statistics prove that World of Warcraft is a highly addictive game for many diverse people, but almost everyone agrees that if you were to join an empty server you would find that it's not an addictive game in one player mode. If you take this a bit further and say.. "ok, now you're on a server with other people, but you're not allowed to join a group, but you are allowed to conference with several players, exchange weapons and loot, and message individual…

To anyone reading, bitkeeper does nothing special in this regard. Enforce commit message standards, plenty of platforms and systems built around git (and literally every other SCM) have support for this.

Here's what he's taking about: http://www.bitkeeper.org/man/citool.html and http://www.bitkeeper.org/man/templates.html

Here is git's analogous feature: https://robots.thoughtbot.com/better-commit-messages-with-a-gitmessage-template

It's possibly the least interesting and least unique selling point an SCM can have. It's really funny that you keep bringing up this example around the thread.

EDIT: To respond to the above edit:

Again, he's Proving The Point. Commits should be atomic. If you have to individually comment on file changes then the correct thing to do would be to put those in their own commit, no? I'm not really sure what's being described is necessarily a cool feature, but rather a way to avoid making sure your changes are truly related. I honestly don't see the point. This seems like a feature that was written because of the decisions that were made into how BitKeeper works internally, not because it's a fantastic idea. You can get the same thing with atomic commits in git. You comment per file, because BK tracks changes per file. Git does not do this. You should be making your commits atomic because git is tracking the actual content. Atomic commits will accurately describe what's being changed, and then of course those all get lumped together in a…

> I don't follow this at all.

I didn't either.

This same user states multiple times that "Everyone knows what a protected class means" and to use "common sense". After being pressed to define it then suggests: "The dictionaries should have a more understandable definition." but then offers no link to "The dictionaries".

This user has 4 followers on GitHub, but is lecturing the Ruby community on "obvious" things that unfortunately aren't that obvious.

I'm all for a robust discussion to make the community a better place, but assuming everyone has your world-view and a common understanding of words that you yourself struggle to define is a quick way to alienate folks who are seriously trying to understand the arguments but need more information.

Other people chime in to recommend that people "educate themselves", and links to an article (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/beyond-best-intentions) which suggests protected classes are: "Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, queer folks, and disabled people" because they "are disproportionately likely to experience bias and discrimination at work and in social circles."

Another user suggests the California definition which is much broader (https://www.senate.ca.gov/content/protected-classes) and includes classes like "marital status" and "genetic characteristics".

It's just better to be clear about what exactly is meant by these terms if possible.

>> I am building an application that has 2 million rows of data.

It will also be helpful to know what kind of hardware you are using for the database. How much RAM the machine has? Does the whole dataset fit in the RAM? If not, at least indexes should fit in the RAM.

Disk type: HDD/SSD?

Are you using indexes?

Did you check "explain analyze"[1] to check your query plans to ensure that the indexes are being used or not?

There are many things that affect database performance.

>> I want to build something that involves billions of rows of data. I want to know how to speed it up.

The key to this is "Shared nothing architecture" along with a Sharded Database. I have tried to explain this architecture here [2]. To understand Database sharding, I would recommend this Digital Ocean Article [3].

To learn more about highly scalable architectures I would suggest reading the real world architectures section [4] of the High Scalability Blog.

[1] https://thoughtbot.com/blog/reading-an-explain-analyze-query-plan

[2] https://mobisoftinfotech.com/resources/mguide/shared-nothing-architecture-the-key-to-scale-your-app-to-millions-of-users/

[3] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/understanding-database-sharding

[4] http://highscalability.com/blog/category/example

I agree that Rails has a kind of a steep learning curve. Also agree that I didn't find the Rails Casts helpful - I found them out of date, so I didn't spend any time watching them.

For me, learning how to learn a new thing at times seems like the hardest part for me. For Rails, the best I've found is the Michael Hartl tutorial [1]. He walks you through setting up a blog with Rails - first the quick way and then the hard way, so you walk away with a nice understanding. He keeps the tutorial up to date and he's been available for questions when I've emailed him. It costs a few bucks ($39) but well worth it IMHO. I spent a few weeks going through that book, did a few apps on my own, and then was able to create new apps fairly quickly.

The official Rails Guides are a great resource too and kept up to date too [2].

Configuring your local rails development environment is pretty easy with the thoughtbot laptop script [3], otherwise it can be kind of a pain to do it from scratch.

[1] https://www.learnenough.com/ruby-on-rails-6th-edition-tutorial
[2] https://guides.rubyonrails.org/
[3] https://thoughtbot.com/blog/laptop-setup-for-an-awesome-development-environment

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