JJinuxLand

Jedi apprentice:I'm thinking about applying to a realtime operating system company. They have a position that requires extensive JavaScript knowledge. I'm thinking about implementing Tetris in JavaScript.Jedi master:It'd be better if you wrote a realtime operating system in JavaScript and got it to run on bare metal using V8...but, hey, Tetris is good too.

I'm a fan of Nicholas Piël's Asynchronous Servers in Python blog post. In a similar vein, my buddy Shailen Tuli and I put together the following spreadsheet. Feel free to view it on Google Docs and make corrections.



A few notes:

It is not my goal to use this spreadsheet to pick favorites. Rather, I'm trying to use this spreadsheet to point out differences among the different approaches.

I know very little about DieselWeb, MultiTask, FriendlyFlow, Weightless, Fibra, and Cogen. All I know is that Nicholas Piël's pointed them out as generator-based libraries.

Some of these libraries support multiple approaches at the same time. For instance, Twisted lets you use a mix of callbacks, generators, and threads. Similarly, Tornado lets you use a mix of callbacks and threads. However, it's important to point out the compromises involved. For instance, if you're using Tornado, you can't have 5000 concurrent clients to a WSGI server; instead you have to switch over…

Have you ever seen the following error:SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=SSLv3 read server certificate B: certificate verify failed (OpenSSL::SSL::SSLError)Apparently, this is a standard problem for Ruby on OS X. The problem is that Ruby is unable to find the root certificates necessary to verify a given certificate. A typical (and very bad) workaround is to turn off certificate validation using some code that looks something like:...verify_mode = OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONEThere's a good blog post called How to Cure Net::HTTP’s Risky Default HTTPS Behavior. It shows you how to force all certificates to be verified, but it doesn't show how to make use of the operating system's most up-to-date list of root certificates.

After reading a ton of different blog posts, this is the approach that I created for my Rails app:# config/initializers/fix_ssl.rb
#
# Work around errors that look like:
#
# SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=SSLv3 read server certificate B: certificate …

I work as a developer advocate at Google. I think it's the most exciting job at the most interesting company in the world, but of course I'm biased ;) In fact, when I came to Google, it turned out to be roughly twice as good as I was hoping it would be. We have a bunch of openings right now. If you're both a hardcore coder as well as a hardcore extrovert, you should think about applying (through me, of course!).

By the way, the interview process is somewhat challenging. You should definitely plan on spending some time in front of a whiteboard. I heartily recommend two books, Cracking the Coding Interview and RESTful Web Services.

The video below is from Google Developer Day 2011, Moscow. Not everyone has to go to Moscow, but I think it conveys part of why I find this job so much fun :)



By the way, we also have other positions within developer relations as well as within Google as a whole.