The internet is an excellent resource for well-intentioned guidance and answers. However, it can sometimes be hard to tell if what you’re reading is, in fact, advice you should follow. Also, some users have a preference toward using a single, trusted online community rather than the open internet to provide them with…
A glance at this year's OSDI program shows that Operating Systems are a small niche topic for this conference, not even meriting their own full session. This is unfortunate because good OS design has always been driven by the underlying hardware, and right now that hardware is almost unrecognizable from ten years ago…
During August 2009, we went on a number of field trips to health centers in remote areas of Thailand and Cambodia. The idea was to conduct a...
You've surely read plenty about how simple is good, but what's wrong with easy?
I think we all knew this might be coming once we finished up with our assembler . While we can in theory solve any computable problem by writing the appropriate assembly for our assembler, writing assembly code can be a bit more cumbersome than a high-level language. There is a reason why we did not write our…
Slack has a global customer base, with millions of simultaneously connected users at peak times. Most of the communication between users involves sending lots of tiny messages to each other. For much of Slack’s history, we’ve used HAProxy as a load balancer for all incoming traffic. Today, we’ll talk about problems we…
An old article, now removed due to being an old time capsule.
While there are a decent number of folks out there modeling systems, there’s a much larger group of folks who think of themselves as systems thinkers but utilize techniques like modeling rather casually (a polite way of saying that they don’t use them). Even with modeling tools available, I’ve often taken the shortcut…
A discussion of aggregation in PostgreSQL and how it integrates with the design of Timescale’s hyperfunctions.
Recently I tried to submit an iDOS update with a few bug fixes, but then got a notification from Apple Review Team, and my heart dropped cold.
I officially transitioned from a lead frontend engineer to a senior engineering manager this year and wanted to provide some insight into…
Right before the Thanksgiving break, while simultaneously attending the SfRBM annual conference (an event featuring lots of hard core wet-bench science grounded in reality), I had the dubious honor of also attending the Longevity Summit . The latter is a new online event featuring talks from leaders in the burgeoning…
Credentials, Expertise, and Feedback Loops
Over the last 25 years, I’ve written a lot of event-driven code in C++. A typical example of event-driven code is registering a callback that gets invoked every time a socket has data to be read. Once you have read an entire message, possibly after many invocations, you parse the message and invoke another callback…
We enable the world to secure the web. Burp Suite, the Web Security Academy, and world-leading research from PortSwigger — the AppSec community’s home.
Roku provides the simplest way to stream entertainment to your TV. On your terms. With thousands of available channels to choose from.
For most queries, Google search is pretty underwhelming these days. Google is great at answering questions with an objective answer, like “# of billionaires in the world” or “What is the population of Iceland”. It’s pretty bad at answering questions that require judgment and context like “What do NFT collectors think…
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021 was awarded jointly to Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan "for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis"
How I am using 50+ sources of my personal data
We describe a set of very unusual dice, and a two player game where you will always have the advantage. You can even teach your opponent how the game works, yet still win again! Finally, we will describe a new game for three players where you can expect to beat both players at the same time! Watch James Grime and…
Apps on Fly.io all get their own routable IPv4 addresses. Here's what that costs us.
This is for people who want to understand how programs get loaded under linux. In particular it talks about dynamically loaded x86 ELF files. The information you learn will let you understand how to debug problems that occur in your program before main starts up. Everything I tell you is true, but some things will be…
