When an application's lock strategy feels more broken than cautious, it's time to rethink your approach to concurrency.

Hovercrafts sound fun until you realize they have no brakes, slide sideways in the wind, and the authorities banned them from roads for good reason.

Watch the August 2009 San Francisco PostgreSQL User Group meeting. Video available for streaming or download.

Dijkstra's famous quip reminds us that asking "can machines think" is as misguided as asking "can submarines swim"—the real questions are about capability and…

A Tron sequel teases the ultimate programmer showdown, but the original film makes one villain suspiciously hireable.

Joe Conway argues against Objective-C's dot notation for method calls, claiming it blurs the line between field access and code invocation.

Apple's iPhone App Store approval process is so vague and arbitrary that even talented developers are walking away.

NULL in SQL is a Frankenstein monster of conflicting philosophies, and learning its quirks—like why aggregates ignore them—requires painful experience.

Watch the PGDay San Jose 2009 sessions now: PostgreSQL 8.4 administration, pg_Migrator upgrades, monitoring best practices, and more.

Why Mercurial won over Git and Bazaar for one developer's workflow, and why you should stop arguing about VCS tools and start shipping code.