What better thing to do, during the hot, hot July days, thank something semi-mechanical involving very little brain power? With student-facing work briefly calming down (we've just about weathered the storm of appeals and complaints following the publication of exam results), and the all-too-brief Summer holidays…
Earlier today , Barry Schwartz published a piece over on Search Engine Roundtable called Google Does Not Use rel=me Microformats . The article got shared around Twitter a lot, and those tweets surfaced on the microformats IRC channel . In it he mentions a few things that I would like to respond to, that is probably…
By virtue of using LLVM, Mono has access to a wide suite of tools and optimization backends. A lot of active research uses LLVM IR. One such research project, Souper, tries to brute-force a search for missed optimizations in our emitted code. The .NET community may have software projects that benefit from using Souper…
An interactive demo (using D3) of CockroachDB. Watch as CockroachDB evolves with your application, from proof-of-concept, to multi-node cluster, to international deployment.
In our company we usually have a fun quiz every sunday and this was one of them
Writing a minimal x86-64 JIT compiler in C++ that runs on macOS, Linux and WSL - Part 2
Managing complexity within an application is one of the key challenges for any software developer. Cleanly reconciling new features with existing architectures is something we strive for.
Unix tradition encourages the use of command-line switches to control programs, so that options can be specified from scripts. This is especially important for programs that function as pipes or filters. Three conventions for how to distinguish command-line options from ordinary arguments exist; the original Unix…
If you’re considering a microservices implementation, and you enjoy this post, you might also enjoy my more recent post Gasp! You Might Not Need Microservices. I recently read a post called The False Dichotomy of Monoliths and Microservices by Jimmy Bogard, which I absolutely loved. While reading through it I noticed…
Update 01/07/19 Greetings from 2019! The good news is that Chicago isn’t yet a radioactive crater. The bad news is almost everything I said about refinement in this article is wrong. I’m working on writing a more in-depth, rigorous treatment of refinement as its own article. But this one is currently explaining…
Like many developers exploring the world of wearables, I’m an avid fan of apps that track your exercise. Companies like Strava & Runkeeper have paved the way for what we can do with motion and health data, creating new and… Continue reading Introduction to Apple WatchKit with Core Motion — Tracking Jumping Jacks
Build a program synthesis tool, to generate programs from specifications, in 20 lines of code using Rosette.
The whole API lifecycle should go agile in order to stay relevant. But, this is made difficult because new Service-Based Architecture makes dependencies skyrocket! It’s time to think of a new way to
What happens when human error enters into semantic versioning and vgo
An overview of optimization tricks for lists and tuples
News and insights on the Android platform, developer tools, and events.
In Visual Studio 2017 release 15.8 Preview 3 we’re announcing support for Just My Code stepping for C++. In addition to previously supported callstack
UML was created in 1994 by engineers at Rational Software to standardize system diagrams. Of the 14 UML diagram types, activity and use case diagrams handle 80% of real-world business process documentation needs.
In “ How I Learned to Stop Worrying and ❤️ the State Machine ,” we built an extremely basic state machine to model a bank account.
With 2019 a day away, let’s reflect on the past to see how we can improve. Yes, let’s take a long look back 30 years and reflect on the original fuzzing paper, An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities, and its 1995 follow-up, Fuzz Revisited, by Barton P. Miller. In this blog post, […]
It all started with a tweet, which seemed to resonate with people:
Several JavaScript data structures such as Map, Set, WeakSet, and WeakMap use hash tables under the hood. This article explains how V8 v6.3 improves hash table performance.
So you’ve bought into this whole RPC thing and want to try it out, but aren’t quite sure about Protocol Buffers. Your existing code encodes your own objects, or perhaps you have code that needs a particular encoding. What to do? Fortunately, gRPC is encoding agnostic! You can still get a lot of the benefits of gRPC…
