Sam Saffron

Recently I embarked on a mission to find and and build tools for dealing with broken links on the Stack Exchange network, here are some things I learned.

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Sam's ultimate web performance tool and resource list

over 5 years ago

While preparing for my talk at Codemania I started filling my slides with links, clearly not something that scales. So, instead, here is a big list of interesting tools and resources that can help you journey through the murky waters of web performance.

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Why upgrading your Linux Kernel will make your customers much happier

over 5 years ago

Learn about a change introduced in the 2.6.39 kernel that has huge impact on your users perceived web performance.

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MiniProfiler 2.0, almost out of the gate

over 5 years ago

We are pushing a 2.0 public release of MiniProfiler, the following post describes most of the awesome changes.

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Stop paying your jQuery tax

over 5 years ago

The last script holding in your header is usually jQuery, learn how to move it to your footer and why you should.

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That annoying INSERT problem, getting data into the DB

over 5 years ago

A common issue many users have with Dapper is the ability to insert records into a database, in this post I cover some options and a solution I developed.

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In managed code we trust, our recent battles with the .NET Garbage Collector

over 5 years ago

In this post I cover the history, diagnosis and eventual repair of some erratic performance we were experiencing at Stack Overflow.

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Optimizing ASP.NET MVC3 Routing

almost 6 years ago

In this post I outline the process and method we used to optimize routing at Stack Overflow

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Spam, bacon, sausage and blog spam: a JavaScript approach

almost 6 years ago

Using rather simple techniques I practically eliminated all of the spam on this blog, here is a technical explanation

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Extending the ASP.NET error page (show me the SQL edition)

almost 6 years ago

In this post I demonstrate how to extend the ASP.NET error page with additional information about the SQL that failed.

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Porting LINQ-2-SQL to Dapper for great justice

almost 6 years ago

In this post I explain how I ported a rather tricky page to dapper, it highlights usage of a new helper called SqlBuilder, that lives in Dapper.Contrib

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Oh view where are thou: finding views in ASP.NET MVC3

almost 6 years ago

Finding views in ASP.NET MVC3 is an often overlooked performance concern.

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Automatically instrumenting an ASP.NET MVC3 app

almost 6 years ago

In this post I work through one method you can use to get controller, view and partial render times in an MVC3 app.

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Profiling your website like a true Ninja

about 6 years ago

I am very happy to re-announce the MVC mini profiler, used in production at Stack Overflow.

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A day in the life of a slow page at Stack Overflow

about 6 years ago

I have been spending a fair amount of time tuning Stack Overflow, in this post I will walk through the process of tuning a single page.

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How I learned to stop worrying and write my own ORM

over 6 years ago

Does the world even need another ORM?

Why we took a step back at Stack Overflow and wrote our on mini ORM

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Interesting answers on Stack Overflow from July

almost 7 years ago

At my new job I have been looking at better ways of highlighting recent interesting answers.

Here is a list of answers I came across in July that I found interesting.

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Diagnosing runaway CPU in a .Net production application

over 7 years ago

Diagnosing runaway/high CPU in production .Net apps has always been a dark art reserved for the true master debuggers.

No longer.

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Got Flare?

almost 8 years ago

A little bit about my new bug tracker. Can tracking bugs be fun?

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Behaviour driven design using rspec IronRuby and C#

almost 8 years ago

I love rspec, and wanted to see what happens if you bring it to .Net, here is a tiny step by step guide to writing your own rspec tests for a C# project.

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Our new startup, Media Browser

about 8 years ago

After a lot of thought and research I have decided to see if we can make a business out of Media Browser.

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Will program for food, the future of Media Browser

about 8 years ago

Media Browser / Video Browser has always been free "as-in-beer":http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FreeAsInBeer and free as-in-speech.

Will it remain free?

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Upcoming features for Media Browser

about 8 years ago

About some upcoming feature for Media Browser.

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Media Browser source code license changes

about 8 years ago

We just changed the way our source code is licensed, this post covers the reasons and details of the changes.

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Refactoring media browser - entity resolution

over 8 years ago

I am going to try to post a little bit about my adventures refactoring Media Browser. In this post I am covering a some aspects of entity resolution.

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Simpler debugging of Vista Media Center plugins

over 8 years ago

In this post I offer a streamlined mechanism for debugging Vista Media Center plugins in Visual Studio.

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Slow response-time is usabilitie's alcoholism

over 8 years ago

For the last few weeks I have been forced to use a very slow website. This has left me feeling very demoralized. This is why.

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My server just died, long live my new VPS

over 8 years ago

Earlier this week I lost my old trusty server which hosts www.samsaffron.com and www.mediabrowser.tv died.

I decided to migrate all the data to a new VPS (virtual private server), here is a sketchy account of how this all happened.

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Deadlocked

almost 9 years ago

In SQL Server a SELECT statement can deadlock against an UPDATE statement without being in a transaction. Why does this happens? What is a good approach to SQL Server deadlocks?

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SSH Jumphosts tunneling and other curiosities

about 9 years ago

Recently, I had to support a rails server which is deep behind a firewall. Here I offer a somewhat sketchy account of how I am able to support it.

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Video Browser: Past, Present and Future

about 9 years ago

Why I started off Video Browser, where it is today, and what are the future plans.

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Speed up your feed generation in Rails

over 9 years ago

In general when generating rss feed in Rails you will be using the builder library, it can be fairly slow unless you take special care.

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You should be very careful when using ActiveRecord eager loading

over 9 years ago

Watch out when you use ActiveRecord eager loading, it has the potential to wreak havoc if you are not careful.

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I fixed up Video Browsers sort by date

over 9 years ago

A new release of Video Browser contains a few bug fixes

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Genre and runtime sort options for Video Browser

over 9 years ago

I just posted a new version of Video Browser that support "by genre" and "by runtime" sort options for movies.

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A cleaner way to iterate through Enumerable lists in Prototype

over 9 years ago

Yet another way to enumerate through Enumerables if you are using the prototype javascript library.

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Redo your migrations in Rails and keep your data

over 9 years ago

On Rails, I find myself quite often fixing up an old migration early in my projects, at this point I already have a bunch of data in my database and I would like to keep it.

So I created a Rake task that takes care of this.

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A few new features for Video Browser

over 9 years ago

I just posted a new version of video browser in my download section!

Posted by: Sam Permalink | Comments (13)

Getting started with Ruby On Rails on Windows

over 9 years ago

In this post I would like to give you all the information you need to get started with Ruby On Rails, on Windows. I will cover the tools you need, the resources you need and some tips.

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Why the hell write yet another blog engine?

over 9 years ago

Writing your own blog software is an ideal first exercise when faced with learning a new web platform.

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Hello World

over 9 years ago

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A new version of Video Browser for Vista MCE

over 9 years ago

Video browser, is a little plugin for Vista MCE that let's you browse your videos the way they were meant to be browsed.

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Goodbye Altiris

almost 10 years ago

Well, it's that time to change jobs. Goodbye Altiris.

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Video Browser for Vista MCE

almost 10 years ago

This is a post about my first attempts with Video Browser.

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IDisposable in Ruby

almost 10 years ago

An example implementation of the IDisposable pattern in the Ruby language.

It looks much nicer in Ruby.

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Insert or Update pattern for Sql Server

over 10 years ago

Implementing the UPSERT (insert or update) pattern in MS SQL Server can be tricky. In this post I explore the various advantages and disadvantages of various implementations.

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