However before I jump in, a couple disclaimers. First, I am a 3rd year undergraduate software engineering student. I interned on the Android team, and +Romain Guy who was responsible for much of the hardware acceleration work in Honeycomb, reviewed some of my code, but I was not on the framework team and I never read the Android rendering source code. I do not have any authoritative Android knowledge and I cannot guarantee what I say here is necessarily 100% accurate, but I have done my best to do my homework.

Second, I’m interning with the Windows Phone team starting in January, so it’s possible that this post will be unconsciously biased against Android, but if you ask any of my friends, it’s really hard to shut me up about Android. I have more Android t-shirts than days of the week and I’d rather give away my Macbook than my Nexus S. The Googlplex is like a second home - I’ve slept there on more than a few occasions to the dismay of startled janitors (and if you ever get a chance to visit, the banana french toast at Big Table Cafe is to die for). If anything, I’m probably biased in Android’s favor.

I get tired of seeing so much misinformation posted and repeated all over the place about how graphics rendering works on Android. Here is some truth

Let me tell you a secret. I don't fix databases. I fix applications.

Companies hire me to "fix the database" because they think it's the source of their performance and downtime problems. This is very rarely the case. Failure to scale is almost always the result of poor management decisions — often a series of them. In fact, these anti-scaling decisions are so often repeated that they have become anti-patterns.

I did a little talk about these anti-patterns at the last MySQL Conference and Expo. Go watch it and then come on back. Now that you've seen the five-minute version (and hopefully laughed at it), you're ready for some less sarcastic detail which explains how to recognize these anti-patterns and how to avoid them.

Bruce Rogers and I graduated from Facebook’s Engineering Bootcamp in January and began researching how HTML5 could apply to games across the Web. We found HTML5 poised to become a potent platform for game development but still hampered by significant performance variance among browsers and drawing techniques. We're hosting a tech talk this evening on what's becoming possible with HTML5 this evening along with speakers from Zynga and SproutCore which will be streamed live.

Making games run faster is a pet topic of mine. Code samples are too specific to help many people, so here are some general principles I’ve learned.

Nintendo 3DS GPU tech demo - The PICA200 graphics core put through its paces.

About a month ago or so, Amy and I release a little (literally, it’s about 5k) HTML5 iPad App for looking up time zones. I don’t mean select-box wasteland like all other time zone sites (who likes select boxes anyway?!), I mean a nicely polished, touch-enabled UI that works offline, too.

One of the most common questions we hear is how to build high-performance systems to do this work. Let's see some ways you can build the functionality you need and get the performance you need. Because I've built two such systems to manage online ads through Google Adwords, Yahoo, MSN and others, it's easy and familiar for me to use the example of search engine marketing. I'll do that throughout this article.

A question I hear once in a while is "why not make all your textual columns TEXT instead of VARCHAR?" I've never heard a solid answer, so I decided to run a simple benchmark - the results are somewhat surprising.