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Learning to Build Distributed Systems
A common question I get at work is “how do I learn to build big distributed systems?”. I’ve written replies to that many times. Here’s my latest attempt.
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How to sleep at night having a cloud service: common architecture do's
I like to sleep, but more importantly, I like to sleep while my cloud service is running.
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Shared Cache Is Going Away
Browsers historically have had a single HTTP Cache. This meant that if www.a.example and www.b.example both used cdn.example/jquery-1.2.1.js then JQuery would only be downloaded once. Since it's the same resource regardless of which site initiates the download, a single shared cache is more efficient. [1]…
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So you think you know C? (2016)
It's a C test. If you think you know C, take this test. It only has 5 questions.
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Operating a large distributed system in a reliable way: practices I learned
For the past few years, I've been building and operating a large distributed system: the payments system at Uber [https://eng.uber.com/payments-platform/]. I've learned a lot about distributed architecture concepts…
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Rebuilding My Personal Infrastructure With Alpine Linux and Docker
My story of replacing three servers, across two countries, running two operating systems with a single server running Alpine Linux and Docker.
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Common Systems Programming Optimizations and Tricks
Today’s blog post is an overview of some common optimization techniques and neat tricks for doing “systems programming” – whatever that means today. We’ll walk through some methods to make your code run faster, be more efficient, and to squeeze just a little more juice from whatever you got.
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Myths Programmers Believe about CPU Caches (2018)
As a computer engineer who has spent half a decade working with caches at Intel and Sun, I’ve learnt a thing or two about cache-coherency. This was one of the hardest concepts to learn back in coll…
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Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
During me being at my parents over the holidays (Christmas 2017) I had the usual IT-support stuff to do, that always happens to tech sa...
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LD_PRELOAD: The Hero We Need and Deserve
A summary of my undying love for LD_PRELOAD.
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How Rust optimizes async/await
The issue to stabilize an initial version of async/await in Rust has left final comment period. The feature looks slated to stabilize in an upcoming release, most likely 1.39. This represents the culmination of an enormous amount of work by people all over the Rust community. But it’s also only the beginning of…
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Popcount CPU instruction
Most CPU architectures in use today have an instruction called popcount , short for “population count”. Here’s what it does: it counts the number of set bits in a machine word. For example (assuming 8-bit words for simplicity), popcount(00100110) is 3 and popcount(01100000) is 2 .
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Zero Cost Abstractions
The idea of a zero cost abstraction is very important to certain programming languages, like Rust and C++, which intend to enable users to write programs with excellent performance profiles with relatively little effort. Since this idea is fundamental to the design of Rust and my work, I want to investigate, for a…
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The Windows Update Marathon in a VM: From Windows 1.01 to XP
Was passiert wenn man ein Windows Update durchführt, oder mehrere?.
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Writing an OS in Rust: Advanced Paging
This post explains techniques to make the physical page table frames accessible to our kernel. It then uses such a technique to implement a function t…
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Measuring mutexes, spinlocks and how bad the Linux scheduler is
This blog post is one of those things that just blew up. From a tiny observation at work about odd behaviors of spinlocks I spent months trying to find good benchmarks, (still not entirely successf…
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The Paxos Algorithm, or How to Win a Turing Award
The lectures assume no prior knowledge of the Paxos consensus algorithm or of TLA+, the language in which the specifications are written. In fact, the lectures constitute a crash course on TLA+. If you're interested just in the algorithm, you will probably find the specs annoying and will try to read only the…
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Infectious Executable Stacks
In software development there are many concepts that at first glance seem useful and sound, but, after considering the consequences of their implementation and use, are actually horrifying. Examples include thread cancellation , variable length arrays , and memory aliasing . GCC’s closure extension to C is another…
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The Next 50 Years of Databases (2015)
Andy attempts to revive his blog by predicting what databases will look like in the year 2065.
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Learning KVM – implement your own kernel
Few weeks ago I solved a great KVM escaping challenge from TWCTF hosted by @TokyoWesterns . I have given a writeup on my blog: [Write-up] T...
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How I Switched to Plan 9
Hi, I’m SL . You may remember me from my classic appearances in contentious 9fans threads , or maybe you’ve read one of my books .
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Why Do Buses Bunch?
Created by Lewis Lehe (of Setosa and UC Berkeley Trans. Eng. ) with design and art by Dennys Hess . Thanks to Ian Johnson for good advice. Tools: d3 , Angular Material , Coffeescript , Browserify , Gulp and Five-Hour Energy Drink .
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Clang Format Tanks Performance
Can using clang-format make your code slower? Kind of.
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Raspberry Pi 4 WiFi stops working at 2560 x 1440 screen resolution
This is part of a series of posts on the design and technical steps of creating Himblick , a digital signage box based on the Raspberry Pi 4.
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