Here is what I found interesting this week.

Exception handling best practices in ASP.NET web applications
Exception handling plays an important part of application management and user experience. If implemented correctly it can make maintenance easier and bring the user experience to a higher level. If not, it can be a disaster.

How many times have you seen the error message that doesn’t make any sense or at least provides some valuable information, or even better - how many times have you seen the famous error screen with exception message and a complete stack trace on yellow background? Too many times, I would say. This is why, among other things, some of my colleagues were very interested in exception handling techniques and best practices.

Did Rails Sink Twitter?
Twitter is arguably the most heavily used Ruby on Rails application in the world. Almost since its inception, Twitter has fostered a wildly passionate cult following. Also from the beginning, Twitter has suffered from chronic outages under that load.

In the past month, record downtime has prompted fresh outcry within its ever-growing user base. This, along with increased attention from mainstream media has forced Twitter to publicly acknowledge these issues, and to reveal a few details about the source of these problems.