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A Software Engineer’s Guide to Cybernetics
Before ‘cyber’ was a prefix for everything internet and computers, it was how mathematicians were going to conquer the world.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,947 posts.
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GPUDirect Storage: A Direct Path Between Storage and GPU Memory
As AI and HPC datasets continue to increase in size, the time spent loading data for a given application begins to place a strain on the total application’s performance. When considering end-to-end…
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How Do Routers Work, Really?
An accessible overview of how exactly a router works, with code examples.
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Is the web getting slower?
As consumer devices and internet speeds become faster, websites become larger and more complex. Is website performance getting worse overall?
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Non-Posix File Systems
Operating systems and file systems have traditionally been developed hand in hand. They impose mutual constraints on each other. Today we have two major leaders in file system semantics: Windows and POSIX . They are very close to each other when compared to the full set of possibilities. Interesting things happened…
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PostgreSQL B-Tree index deduplication
PostgreSQL 13 development is coming along nicely, Postgres 13 Beta3 was released on 8/13/2020 . The Postgres Beta 1 and 2 releases were released in May and June 2020. One of the features that has my interest in Postgres 13 is the B-Tree deduplication effort. B-Tree indexes are the default indexing method in Postgres…
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How to take back control of /etc/resolv.conf on Linux (2018)
Take manual control of your Linux system’s DNS resolution and keep programs from interfering with and overwriting your resolv.conf file.
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Massacring C Pointers (2018)
I'm taking a break from debugging books to talk about a calamitous shitshow of textbook writing: Mastering C Pointers: Tools for Programming Power , by Robert J. Traister.
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A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
These views generally result in my being labeled a Luddite by the Unix priesthood. But Ned Ludd was right --- the new machines did not make conditions better for ordinary working folk: the people whose conditions were immediately improved were those who owned the machinery, and whose profits thereby increased…
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On modern hardware the min-max heap beats a binary heap
The heap is a data structure that I use all the time and that others somehow use rarely. (I once had a coworker tell me that he knew some code was mine because it used a heap) Recently I was writin…
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Kubernetes: Make your services faster by removing CPU limits
At Buffer, we’ve been using Kubernetes since 2016. We’ve been managing our k8s (kubernetes) cluster with kops, it has about 60 nodes (on AWS), and runs about 1500 containers. Our transition to a micro-service architecture has been full of trial and errors. Even after a few years running k8s, we are still learning its…
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Unix Wars (2000)
Unix Wars
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Modernizing the OpenBSD Console
Facts, directions, and thoughts regarding the evolution of OpenBSD framebuffer consoles
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Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?
Provision of maintenance procedures and tools is at the heart of software engineering, but not in macOS.
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We Replaced an SSD with Storage Class Memory
MongoDB's blog includes technical tutorials, MongoDB best practices, customer stories, and industry news related to the leading non-relational database.
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Don't trust default timeouts
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…
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What Shell Am I Using?
I wanted to install the latest version of zsh on my MacBook Pro. This is usually the first thing I install when setting up a new machine. A brew install zsh and a chsh later and I'm good to go (well, technically I had to add the homebrew location of zsh to /etc/shells as well). Close out Terminal.app and reopen to…
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Netflix is now doing per-shot encoding for UHD content
by Aditya Mavlankar, Liwei Guo, Anush Moorthy and Anne Aaron
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Shrinking a Kotlin Binary by 99.2%
We'll get to the shrinking, but first let's motivate the binary in question. Three years ago I wrote the "Surfacing Hidden Change to Pull Requests" post which covered pushing important stats and diffs into PRs as a comment. This avoids surprises with changes that affect binary size, manifests, and dependency trees.
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A log/event processing pipeline you can't have (2019)
Let me tell you about the still-not-defunct real-time log processing pipeline we built at my now-defunct last job. It handled logs from a la...
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Chrome just got faster with Profile Guided Optimization
From the very beginning , we built Chrome to be the fastest browser possible. The faster Chrome is, the faster you find the information you ...
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A tale of webpage speed, or throwing away React
Back in 2011, I happened to get a job writing Backbone.js app. If you never did that, don’t. I was complaining about difficulties with composition left and right to [...]
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Btrfs Coming to Fedora 33
The default filesystem will be BTRFS for Fedora 33 and onwards. Read more here about what that means for the Fedora community.