Tor's Fall Harvest: The Next Generation of Onion Services
We are hyped to present the next generation of onion services! We've been working on this project non-stop for the past 4 years and we officially launched it two weeks ago by publishing our first alpha releases. All in all, the new system is a well needed improvement that fixes many shortcomings of the old design, and…
ESP8266 ePaper WiFi Display Kit Runs for Months on a Charge
In my humble opinion—as I’ve mentioned elsewhere—ePaper is really an amazing display technology that has never really burst onto the mainstream. ePaper is incredibly energy efficient, requiri…
At Scale, Rare Events Aren’t Rare
I’m a connoisseur of failure. I love reading about engineering failures of all forms and, unsurprisingly, I’m particularly interested in data center faults. It’s not that I delight in engineering failures. My interest is driven by believing that the more faults we all understand, the more likely we can engineer…
How to Get Your First 1,000 Customers
There are a variety of methods to attract your first 1,000 customers, but launching with the press is my favorite. I’ll explain why and how to do it.
EFF's 100-Day Plan
The Trump presidency starts Friday. Here is the Electronic Frontier Foundation's agenda. In a matter of days, the United States will enter a new era. On Friday, President Elect Donald J. Trump will swear the oath of office, pledging to uphold the Constitution. But as EFF has learned in the course...
Understanding Git Filter-Branch and the Git Storage Model
The other day Steve wanted git alchemy done on the Rust repo. Specifically, he wanted the reference and nomicon moved out into their own repositories …
How Do You Know a Developer Is Doing a Good Job?
There are many ways to evaluate a developer. Should we use quantitative metrics or stick to qualitative ones?
Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer
You should hire an old programmer. It’s true! Sure.. older programmers are not going to work as many hours as someone fresh out of college. They have kids and spouses and mortgages and softball games to attend. They won't hang out at the office playing Xbox and ping-pong all night. They will not work 80 hour weeks and…
House Address “Twins” Proximity
In a previous post, I did a bit of analysis of the names of towns and streets . However, that clearly wasn’t enough to sate my bizarre interest in all things address-based, so here I am again with more street-name-based nerdery.
Hard Drive Cost per Gigabyte
For hard drive prices, the race to zero is over: nobody won. As you’ll see, the hard drive pricing curve has flattened out.
Introducing WAL-G: Faster Disaster Recovery for Postgres
A key part of running a reliable database as a service is ensuring you have a good plan for disaster recovery. This post introduces WAL-G, the successor to WAL-E for Postgres, a complete rewrite of WAL-E that provides the same functionality plus 4x faster restores on recovery.
Of SVG, Minification and Gzip
Smaller files are downloaded faster, so making an asset file size smaller before sending it to a client is a good thing to do.
Open Container Initiative specifications are 1.0
No single cloud fits all. Explore how we build a more flexible future with hybrid cloud.
A programming language from scratch: 3 steps to an interpreter
A little while ago I wrote about 16bitjs, a 16 bit virtual machine written in javascript. It implemented a custom CPU architecture and assembly language, assembler, and debugger. I had the thought …
Building a Distributed Log from Scratch: Data Replication
In part one of this series we introduced the idea of a message log, touched on why it’s useful, and discussed the storage mechanics behind it. In part two, we discuss data replication. We have our log. We know how to write data to it and read it back as well as how data is persisted. The caveat to this is, although we…
Open Source .NET three years later
A little over 3 years ago Microsoft announced that they were open sourcing large parts of the .NET framework and as Scott Hanselman said in his Connect 2016 keynote, the community has been contributing in a significant way: