Lessons Learned from Reading Post Mortems
I love reading postmortems. They're educational, but unlike most educational docs, they tell an entertaining story. I've spent a decent chunk of time reading postmortems at both Google and Microsoft. I haven't done any kind of formal analysis on the most common causes of bad failures (yet), but there are a handful of…
Warming up to Go
Lately, as I’ve had more experience with it, I’ve started to warm up to the language Go (aka “golang”).
How to Be a Lawyer Without Going to Law School
A handful of lawyers practice law in the United States without a law degree, bypassing three years of hell (and thousands of dollars in college debt). Here's how.
A new Microsoft browser?
Recently the news broke that Microsoft may be working on another browser instead of IE. After reviewing the available evidence I’ve come to the conclusion that, although Microsoft is making a few adjustments, and a name change for IE might be a good idea, the new browser will essentially be IE12. Still, I think we web…
A Path to Enlightenment in Programming Language Theory
Learning about Programming Language Theory can be a tough journey, particularly for programming practitioners who haven’t studied it formally. This resource is here to help. Please feel free to get in touch if you have ideas for improvement.
Users Rationally Rejecting Security Advice (2009)
This paper, by Cormac Herley at Microsoft Research, sounds like me: Abstract: It is often suggested that users are hopelessly lazy and unmotivated on security questions. They chose weak passwords, ignore security warnings, and are oblivious to certicates errors. We argue that users’ rejection of the security advice…
Invented here syndrome
An explanation of how I use an LLM to help me with Unity, do math quicker, and add Victorian flavour to the text.
Elixir – The next big language for the web
In this article I will explain whyI thinkthe Elixir language will make a bigimpact in the world of web development.
Futures for C++11 at Facebook
Visit the post for more.
Whatever happened to Channel 1?
On June 15, 1936, the FCC began informal hearings concerning the radio spectrum above 30 MHz. There was an increasing demand for those frequencies and a new word began to be heard at the FCC; that word was standards. The Radio Manufacturers Association (RMA), the trade association for the radio and television…
Security: OpenBSD vs. FreeBSD
Blog about network and security, showing example of Linux iptables and Snort configuration, and Windows security softwares.
Career-Changing Programming Books
When I graduated with a Computer Science degree ten years ago, I was excited to dive into the world of professional programming. I had done well in school, and I thought I was completely ready to ...
System design implications of declining network latency vs. disk latency
Hardware performance “obviously” affects software performance and affects how software is optimized. For example, the fact that caches are multiple orders of magnitude faster than RAM means that blocked array accesses give better performance than repeatedly striding through an array.
Why Percentiles Don’t Work the Way We Think
Customers ask us for p99 (99th percentile) of metrics pretty frequently. We plan to add such a feature to Database Performance Monitor (DPM)(more on that later). But a lot of the time, when customers make this request, they have something very specific, and different, ...
Thunderstrike 2: Mac firmware worm details
Collection of my projects and hacks.
Running Rust on the Rumprun Unikernel
The Rust programming language has been able to run on bare-metal without the standard library for quite some while now. However, most Rust applications depend on the std crate, and therefore still need a full operating system to run.
Victory for CloudFlare Against SOPA-like Court Order
Striking a blow against the continuing effort to force service providers to serve as IP police, CloudFlare and EFF have pushed back against a court order that would have required CloudFlare to monitor its service to enforce a trademark held by a group of music labels. Last week, Judge Alison J....
What Would You Recommend to a Bright 14 Year Old?
I'm receiving lots of recommendations via the HN item, I will need to vet and categorise them, but they are mostly looking great. Here, unvetted and uncategorised are some:
What makes Nim practical?
In my last post I showed what makes the Nim programming language special. Today, let’s consider Nim from another angle: What makes Nim a practical programming language?
A different cluetrain
Back to: Escape from the planet of the Ice Giants | Forward to: Even More Obligatory Author Shilling
MariaDB 10.1 can do 1M queries per second
MariaDB 10.1 not only contains tons of new features, it has also been polished to deliver top performance. The biggest improvement has been achieved for scalability on massively multithreaded hardware. The following numbers show the throughput for a simplified sysbench OLTP benchmark on MariaDB-10.1.8 compared to…
What is a 'unikernel'?
Learn what unikernels are, how they remove OS bloat between hardware and applications, and why they're gaining traction in cloud and microservices.
An unexpected benefit of open-sourcing our code
Recently I was contacted by Dr. Igor Kozin from The Institute of Cancer Research in London. He asked about the optimal way to compile CloudFlare's open source fork of zlib.