Barrett's blog

I've been working on a Drupal module which aggregates and reports on some data from Mongo. In order to keep from having to re-do all the aggregations, the aggregated data itself is written off to a Mongo collection which is then retrieved and displayed when the reports are requested. To make the retrieval more efficient, I need an index on the table storing the aggregated data.

One of the systems I've lately inherited makes heavy use of Mongo for data storage, a data system I've not used previously. So, when the boss called tonight and said that his boss needed counts of an object in our system by state in the next 10 minutes my thinking went something like...

No problem, that's a simple SQL group-by....Oh, wait. This is mongo. Oh, crap! How do I do that?! It's a function; Map...Something.

Now that I'm commuting into the city each day, I've been forced to actually learn my way around metro. It didn't take me long to get tired of checking my phone for the station map, so I put together a little mnemonic to help me remember the order of the stations on my route: Bethesda to Union Station.

I've joined the Cult of Mac.

Developing Community Management Metrics and Tools for Mozilla

Drupal Voices 175: Clay Shirky on Social Media Theory and Drupal
In his interview for Lullabot's Drupal Voices series, social media guru Clay Shirky made two points I found especially interesting, both of which have direct impact on how we design social sites.

I came across these great videos giving a simple introduction to what Agile is and how it differs from waterfall. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear their author is making any more in the series.
User Stories from Agile Advocate on Vimeo.
Agile Planning from Agile Advocate on Vimeo.

DrupalCon Chicago is done. Now it's time to unpack, review and condense my notes, and begin to sort out how to integrate everything I learned into my processes going forward. In subsequent posts, I'll expand on each of the points below, but my goal at the moment is to lay out the biggest things I'm bringing back from the con.