Read the original article at Best of Guide – Highlights of Our Popular Content

We cherry pick the top 5 most popular posts of various topics we’ve covered in recent months.

• 5 Things Toxic to Scalability

We use a broad brush to highlight the biggest no-nos in web application scalability.

We dig into scalability, steering to the richest areas to focus on.

MySQL on Amazon EC2, the what, how …

Read the original article at Top MySQL DBA interview questions (Part 1)

MySQL DBAs are in greater demand now than they’ve ever been. While some firms are losing the fight for talent, promising startups with a progressive bent are getting first dibs with the best applicants. Whatever the case, interviewing for a MySQL DBA is a skill in itself so I thought I’d share a guide of top MySQL DBA interview questions to help with your screening process.
It’s long and detailed with some background to give context so I will be publishing this in two parts.

The history of the DBA as a career

In the Oracle world of enterprise applications, the DBA has long been a strong career path. …

Read the original article at How to hire a developer that doesn’t suck

Strip by Randall Munroe; xkcd.com

First things first. This is not meant to be a beef against developers. But let’s not ignore the elephant in the living room that is the divide between brilliant code writers and the risk averse operations team.

It is almost by default that developers are disruptive with their creative coding while the guys in operations, those who deploy the code, constantly cross their fingers in the hope that application changes won’t tilt the machine. And when you’re woken up at 4am to deal with an outage or your sluggish site is costing millions in losses, the blame game and finger-pointing starts.

If you manage a startup …

We're hiring. We are looking for the following qualifications:

1. Expert knowledge of MySQL. Not just "certified" -- years of production experience with it. You need to know server internals, for example. You need to be able to do anything from optimizing difficult queries to moving high-volume services between data centers without interruption.
2. Expert knowledge of InnoDB. You should understand its inner workings well enough to answer questions about its internals from memory, such as "how does the insert buffer work?" or "how does MVCC work on secondary indexes?" You should also know why it has trouble on some workloads and how to solve that.
3. Expert knowledge of Linux systems administration. You need to know how to solve issues with filesystems, hardware, and networking. You need to be able to use tools such as gdb, strace, tcpdump, etc to solve weird problems.
4. Expert with Apache, memcached, and other …

At the beginning of 2009, I was hired by Tag1 Consulting as Jeremy Andrews' full time partner. A decidedly questionable decision on his part, but a great change for me! I used to work at the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University and I am currently the sysadmin for drupal.org. Working at the OSL and drupal.org spoiled me, I'll be completely honest about that. I got used to working with interesting new technologies and consistently pushing the limits of my knowledge.

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Few days ago we were chatting in our corporate Campfire room and one of the guys asked me what do I think about Rails developers hiring process, what questions I’d ask a candidate, etc… This question started really long and interesting discussion and I’d like to share my thoughts on this question in this post.

So, first of all I would like to explain what kind of interviews I really hate Ever since I was thinking of myself as of a developer (many years ago) and was going to “software developer position” interviews I really hated questions like “What is the name and possible values of the third parameter of the function some_freakin_weird_func() from some_weird.h” or “How to declare a virtual destructor and when it could be useful?”… All my life I had pretty practical thinking and never bothered to learn APIs or some really deep language concepts that are useful in 1% of …

Arjen & gang are looking for skilled and enthusiastic colleagues!
Essentials

• guru level practical skills in MySQL schema/query design, server administration and tuning;
  
• expertise with common dev and deployment infrastructure (mainly Linux but also other *nix and Windows);
  
• freedom to travel without restriction;
  
• self-motivated, ability to work independently (from anywhere - good Internet access required);
  
• excellent written/verbal English, comfortable public speaker.

Being a small, company, the range of possible work tasks can be quite diverse, although you are not required to be able to do everything. That said, your application will be more highly regarded if you exhibit a broad range of skills and interests, both directly technical and otherwise.
Desirable abilities

• shell and Perl scripting;
  
…

Big Cats by micalngelo

“Every startup CEO is at least thinking about the need to cut back right now” – Michael Arrington

“We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.” – Warren Buffet

I’ll give you one guess as to which man I’m listening to. So no, not every startup CEO is cutting back. Apple spent their time innovating during the last downturn and look where it got them. I’m thrilled to have just passed out big, healthy profit-sharing bonuses to all of our employees this week for the 5th consecutive year. We think and hope they’ll be even bigger next year.