Roberto's blog
Visit robertovitillo.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Feb 2018 – Oct 2023
Systems & Performance 4Software Engineering 2Security & Privacy 1Networking & Internet 1Databases & Data 1Tech Industry & Business 1
An application typically starts its life as a monolith. Take a modern backend of a single-page Javascript application, for example - it starts out as a single stateless web service that exposes a RESTful HTTP API and uses a relational database as a backing store. The service is composed of a number of components, or…
Why do you need to place your servers geographically close to your users? One of the reasons is to achieve lower latencies. That makes a lot of sense when you are sending short bursts of data that should be delivered as quickly as possible. But what about large files, such as videos? Surely there is a latency penalty…
There are two types of engineers, the ones that can quickly do estimates and the ones that can’t. Are these people just smarter, or is there more to it? Enrico Fermi was a master at estimation Back of the envelope estimation is a skill that can be learned with practice. It becomes easier once you get familiar with…
Modern applications don’t crash; they hang. One of the main reasons for it is the assumption that the network is reliable. It isn’t. When you make a network call without setting a timeout, you are telling your code that you are 100% confident that the call is going to succeed. Would you really take that bet? If you…