Greg Luck's Blog

On 10 and 11th November someone using my stolen Mastercard number created some listings on ebay.com.au, gumtree.com.au and carsales.com.au. I noticed the transactions on the 12th and contacted the fraud department of my bank. I cancelled the card (inconvenient as I was leaving to go overseas for two weeks) and initiated the chargeback process for the charges (only about $80 in total).

It turns out that at least one of the listings was activated. On Gumtree, a Nissan Patrol was listed as being for sale at my address. I don’t own a Nissan Patrol and it is not for sale. The ad did however look convincing. Interestingly the contact phone number was disconnected which I guess forces interested purchasers to come to our house. Accordingly a few people turned up to look at it which spooked my wife. Today my wife got a text pretending to be from me and listing an email address purportedly mine at gregluck8@live.com.au.

I presume what is happening is an attempted identity theft and that the thief plans to defraud third parties. Accordingly we have reported everything to the Queensland Police at their Milton Station starting on 12th November and will continue to report further episodes in his saga.

Now my purpose for blogging about all of this is to put on notice third parties who might think they are transacting with me. I suggest you try and establish that it is me. If in person ask to see my passport. If electronic it is harder, but a good starting point would be to use my actual email which is gluck AT gregluck.com. And if you are technically inclined I use GPG. My public key is here: gregluck-public-gpg-key.

A few weeks ago I attended a ThoughtWorks Technology Radar seminar. I worked at ThoughtWorks for years and think if anyone knows what is trending up and down in software development these guys do. At number 17 in Techniques with a rising arrow is what they called Thoughtful Caching. At drinks with Scott Shaw, I asked him what it meant.

What the trend is about is the movement from reactive caching to a new style. By reactive I mean you find out your system doesn’t perform or scale after you build it and it is already in production. Lots of Ehcache users come to it that way. This is a trend I am very happy to see.

Deliberate Caching

The new technique is:

• proactive
• planned
• implemented before the system goes live
• deliberate
• is more than turning on caching in your framework and hoping for the best – this is the Thoughtful part
• uses an understanding of the load characteristics and data access patterns

Why it has taken this long?

Some people think caching is dirty

Following the lead of giant dotcom

Early Performance Optimisation is seen as an anti -pattern

Under Agile we focus on the simplest thing that can possibly work. Requirements are expected to keep changing. Any punts you take on future requirements may turn out to be wrong and your effort wasted. You only add things once it is clear they are needed. Performance and scalability tend to get done this way as well. Following this model you find out about the requirement after you put the app in production and it fails. This same way of thinking causes monolithic systems with single data stores to be built which later turn out to need expensive re-architecting.

I think we need to look at this as Capacity Planning. If we get estimated numbers at the start of the project for number of users, required response times, data volumes, access patterns etc then we can capacity plan the architecture as well as the hardware. And in that architecture planning we can plan to use caching. Because caching affects how the system is architected and what the hardware requirements are, it makes sense to do it then.

I have done a Q&A with InfoQ on similarities between Distributed Caches and NoSQL Stores. Read it here.