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Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect. He is the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful things so that people can do stuff. He is the guy you want on your team building go-carts, because he has two favorite tools: duct tape and WD-40. And he will wield them elegantly even as your go-cart is careening down the hill at a mile a minute. This will happen while other programmers are still at the starting line arguing over whether to use titanium or some kind of space-age composite material that Boeing is using in the 787 Dreamliner.

I recently discovered memcached which is a distributed, object caching system originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick of LiveJournal fame. You can think of memcached as a giant hash table that can run on multiple servers which automatically handles maintaining the balance of objects hashed to each server and transparently fetches/removes objects from over the network if they aren't on the same machine that is accessing an object in the hash table. Although this sounds fairly simple, there is a lot of grunt work in building a distributed object cache which handles data partitioning across multiple servers and hides the distributed nature of the application from the developer. memcached is a well integrated into the typical LAMP stack and is used by a surprising number of high traffic websites including Slashdot, Facebook, Digg, Flickr and Wikipedia. Below is what C# code that utilizes memcached would look like sans exception handling code