It’s scary times at the moment. The Corona Virus (SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19) is raging through Europe at this moment, with hundreds of people dying in Italy, Spain and France and most of the those countries, along with the US, in lock-down. The hospital system is currently not equipped to be able to handle the peak number of patients that will require intensive care: doctors from Italy, France and New York are telling stories about how they have to choose who lives and dies, and I’m fearful that we may start hearing stories like that here. There is currently no cure, nor no treatment. There’s been models indicating that even if we take steps to suppress the virus now, there will be continuous surges in outbreaks until a vaccine is ready in 12 to 18 months, suggesting that we may need to be in a state of lock-down or at the very least, rigid social distancing until August 2021 at the latest. The WHO reckons that a majority of the worlds population will get infected over the next year.

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I was listening to Episode 277 of The Talk Show in which John Gruber was discussing virus scanners on Apple Macs with John Moltz. The discussion turned briefly to the state of virus scanners on Windows, and how invasive these commercial scanners were compared to Windows Defender provided by Microsoft.

Hearing this discussion brought memories of my experience with virus scanners back in the days of Windows XP and earlier. There was no Microsoft Defender back then so we had to have a license for one of the commercial scanners that were sold to home users at the time, such as Norton AntiVirus. Given how insecure Windows was back then, it was one of the first things we had to put on a fresh install of Windows. And these things certainly slowed Windows down. But we recognised that it was necessary and after a couple of weeks, we eventually got use to it.

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I’ve always enjoyed this rant from Steve Yegge about how Google differed from Amazon in how they develop their services. Not sure if it’s applicable now but it was quite interesting to hear how the two companies differed in their approach in building and releasing products. After hearing that Google+ was being shutdown, I wondered what would happen with the rant, and whether it would be lost to time. It was fortunate that someone saved it.

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Very interesting post on the Shopify Engineering Blog on the difference between 5 types of data-stores available to developers, and under what circumstances they should be used.

I find it tricky to decide on the best technology for storing data for a particular project. I guess the important thing to keep in mind is to try and figure out as best you can how the data is going to be used (i.e. queried). If you know that, the decision should be easy once you know what’s out there, and this blog post certainly helps in this regard. If you don’t, I guess the next best thing is to try to find the option that will give you the most flexibility with hopefully not too much loss in performance.

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