I recently had an interesting experience with Facebook. I made an application that let a user search for another user’s public albums even if they weren’t on each other’s friends list. This application didn’t violate any clause of the TOS list at the time. The application made use of a design decision on Facebook’s part [...]

Recently I discovered that the recommended way of changing a column type of a table in MySQL is intolerably slow. By recommended I mean that the first result of searching for “how to change column type mysql” (excluding quotes) is a link to the MySQL developer documentation for an ALTER TABLE query.
The circumstances started [...]

I’m currently working on a small project that led me to look for the best way to fetch a random row from a MySQL database. Online research showed that a common solution to this problem is something similar to
[1]

SELECT * FROM `TABLE` ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1;

The problem with this solution is that it assigns [...]