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Much has been said about the effects that AI will have on software development, but there is an angle I haven’t seen talked about: I believe that AI will bring formal verification, which for decades has been a bit of a fringe pursuit, into the software engineering mainstream.
My book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications , recently passed the milestone of 100,000 copies sold. Last year, it was the second-best-selling book in O’Reilly’s entire catalogue, second only to Aurélien Géron’s machine learning book . Machine learning is obviously a hot topic, so I am quite content with coming…
Every educated person really ought to have a basic understanding of accounting. Just like maths, science, programming, music, literature, history, etc., it’s one of those things which helps you make sense of the world. Although dealing with money is not much fun, it’s an unavoidable part of life, so you might as well…
A talk at Hydra distributed computing conference , online (originally planned to be in Moscow, Russia), 06 Jul 2020
Update (July 2015): This post is now rather outdated, and the procedure for modifying your private key files is no longer recommended. A better solution is to use ssh-keygen -o .
As part of the research for my book , I came across an algorithm called Redlock on the Redis website. The algorithm claims to implement fault-tolerant distributed locks (or rather, leases [1]) on top of Redis, and the page asks for feedback from people who are into distributed systems. The algorithm instinctively set…
Over the last 6 months, we have been learning what it means to support a launched product.
This blog post has been translated into Russian , Japanese , Chinese , and Chinese again . For more detail on problems with CAP, and a proposal for an alternative, please see my paper A Critique of the CAP Theorem .
Databases are global, shared, mutable state. That’s the way it has been since the 1960s, and no amount of NoSQL has changed that. However, most self-respecting developers have got rid of mutable global variables in their code long ago. So why do we tolerate databases as they are?
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Having spent a lot of the last few years worrying about the scalability of data-heavy applications like Rapportive , I have started to get the feeling that maybe we have all been “doing it wrong”. Maybe what we consider to be “state of the art” application architecture is actually holding us back.
Keynote at 15th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-based Systems (DEBS) , Online (originally planned to be in Milan, Italy), July 2021.
Paul Graham has written a bunch of good essays on entrepreneurship, laying down much of the philosophy behind Y Combinator . If you’ve not read any of them yet, you should go and read them now – they contain lots of wisdom.
With Donald Trump suspended from Twitter and Facebook, and Parler kicked off AWS, there is renewed discussion about what sort of speech is acceptable online, and how it should be enforced. Let me say up front that I believe that these bans were justified. However, they do raise questions that need to be discussed…
tl;dr: I have created a test suite for comparing the transaction isolation levels in different databases. I did this as background research for my book . This post explains why.