Your experience really resonates with me. I too suffer from occasional panic attacks. What techniques do you use to suppress them?

Mindful deliberate diaphragmatic breathing has allowed me to completely overcome panic attacks.

A simple exercise to learn diaphragmatic breathing is to lay down on your back and put a textbook on your stomach. Place your hand on your chest. Focus on each inhalation only moving the book, your hand/chest should not move at all :)

A little late, but anyway..

I've had panic attacks in two locations: while falling asleep in bed and in crowded trains.

I guess I just kinda got used to them. Since I know what's coming I don't feel the 'panic' part of the attack anymore. I just breathe slowly, deeply and deliberately, focus on my breathing. If I get the adrenaline rush you might be familiar with, I sometimes get up and walk a bit.

They key for me is to recognize when I'm having or starting to have one and not focusing on it too much. I don't know if it helped, but I used to meditate quite often. That tought me a lot about keeping my mind in check. This helps with many things, amongst which falling asleep (I just clear my mind and I'm gone in under 10 minutes) and panic attacks.

Nothing special about the db - just PostgreSQL on Heroku

I agree. I'm a huge proponent on giving it a try and seeing where you are from just doing it.

Exactly as painful as it might seem. Automated tests can only get you so far. Sometimes you just have to suck it up and dig into the code base.

Agreed that is why I always walk to work and rarely bring my car.

No you're definitely not the only one. My company uses EC2 for our production environment and I loathe the management interface with a passion. Amazon should definitely hire a UI expert to give that damn thing a face lift.

It's a mix really, some of it works beautifully, some of it leaves me thinking "I like this but... why haven't they tweaked x" and some really is just horrible.

I'm an interested party as well. As a student of machine learning I would love to learn the techniques you've applied. I'm doing a data mining startup and this would be very helpful.

I think the rabbit hole goes a little deeper than that don't you think?

> content tube sites that have some really quite excellent taxonomy, categorization and deeper search functions - surfacing the content that each viewer wants is a unique experience for each person.

Fascinating what sort of sites have this feature?

Wow looks like web.py for PHP. I think I've seen a similar project whilst lurking around Github the other day.