What I'm Reading 2010-10-22

Free Amazon Web Services for new customers. Amazon are giving away 12 months (from the date of your sign up) of a bunch of Amazon services. If you want to try to start up a business, now is the time to try! IronRuby is alive! There was some conjecture about the life of IronRuby after Microsoft cut the team. One of the original developers is picking up where he left off. Programming is for Stupid People… You know, I think he’s right! SQL Server Transaction Marks are a great feature that very few people seem to know about. I’ve used these in the past for critical workloads and transaction demarcation. You should try it out, you’ll like it. Using MySQL as NoSQL Just because you need something to be fast, doesn’t mean you have to learn something new. ARel Two Point Ohhhhh Yaaaaaa Arel is the new Ruby on Rails/ActiveRecord ORM. It’s also interesting because it is an abstract syntax tree – meaning that it can be used to make arbitrary grammars for anything (including SQL). Aaron Patterson walks through the optimizations that were made to Arel 2.0 to bring it up to par with the old ActiveRecord implementation.