Software engineering, distributed systems, databases, and the teams that build them
Software engineering, distributed systems, databases, and the teams that build them
I came across a very readable paper on distributed systems — Distributed systems for fun and profit. I recommend it for anyone interested in learning more about distributed systems, and the challenges involved with designing, building, and operating distributed systems.
Packt recently asked me to review their new publication Mastering ElasticSearch by Rafał Kuć and Marek Rogoziński. Since most of my experience with elasticsearch has been from a systems points of view — index management, cluster maintenance, indexing performance — I…
AWS have posted the video online of Jim Nisbet’s and my talk at AWS:reinvent 2013. In it, Jim and I describe the system we built at Loggly, which uses Apache Kafka, Twitter Storm, and elasticseach, to build a high-performance log…
This past week I had the opportunity to speak, with my colleague Jim Nisbet, at AWS re:Invent 2013. Titled “Unmeltable Infrastructure at Scale: Using Apache Kafka, Twitter Storm, and Elastic Search on AWS“, Jim and I described the architecture of…
Loggly recently held an elasticsearch meetup, which was a great success. One question that was repeatedly asked was how to ensure elasticsearch does not suffer a partition — known as a split-brain. This can be a particular problem in AWS…
After 14 months of hard work, the next generation of Loggly has been released. It’s been a great time to be part of the Software Infrastructure team at Loggly and we have put together a superb log aggregation & real-time…
As technical lead at Loggly, responsibility for a well-engineered infrastructure ends with me. And one way to ensure the system is designed and implemented well is to stay as close as possible to the code, ensuring that the team and…
I have written another post for the Loggly blog — all about our guidelines for choosing and integrating open-source software and technology in your next project. Check it out here.
I recently wrote my first post for the Loggly blog. It illustrates why host machines are often the worst place to store the logs those machines are generating. You can check it out here.
When running a large real-time processing system, monitoring is critical. But it does more than allow you to keep an eye on your system. During development it allows you test hypotheses about how it works, how it performs when certain…
The Boost ASIO Library is a wonderful piece of software. I’ve built high-performance event-driven IO C++ programs that just scream — it works very well. However, there is one subtlety when it comes to timers — specifically when it comes…
Cassandra is an open-source, distributed database, informally known as a NoSQL database. It is designed to store large amounts of data, offer high-write performance, and provide fault-tolerance. I recently needed some hands-on experience with Cassandra, and being relatively new to…
I needed some C++ code to generate Type-1 time-based UUIDs. The Boost libraries, while offering support for other types, don’t have support for time-based UUIDs. A cut of my code can be found in github.
I finally moved to mutt for my Loggly e-mail (which runs on Google Mail). After moving from e-mail client to e-mail client, I was keen to give it a try — the minimalist design and speed really appealed. It took…
After almost 5 years at Riverbed Technology, it’s time for new challenges. I’ve started a new development position at Loggly in San Francisco, helping to build their Cloud-based Logging-as-a-Service platform. I spent significant time at building systems that needed comprehensive…
Dogfood testing is an effective way to increase testing, and get valuable feedback, on one’s products. It can be especially effective in the earlier stages of a product’s development, when the user base can be small. Having a forgiving —…
My experience with Fedora 15 was not as I had hoped. The ATI graphics driver was particularly problematic (regular minute-long hangs due to spinlock issues) so I decided to try a completely different distribution. I decided to go with Kubuntu…
Another post for the Riverbed Technology Blog, on the value of looking back. You can read it here.
CPU emulation, particularly of older processors, is an interesting topic. While emulation source code for various CPU cores is easily available, I wanted to better understand how to interface the emulated CPU with my host machine. Therefore I decided to…
It’s been almost 18 months since I installed Fedora Core 12, so I decided to move onto Fedora 15. While the install went OK, I am not (yet) convinced it was worth the hassle. While it’s nice to pick up…
Another post, written by me, for the Riverbed Technology blog — this time about the value of Alpha and Beta testing. Software developers, such as myself, can get very involved with a single part of the new software on which…
I recently wrote a entry for the Riverbed Technology blog, describing an interesting collaborative development experience I had with the AWS EC2 Cloud. You can read it here.
I came to Django development from much lower-level development — embedded software, device drivers, and system software. What has impressed me most about Django (and python in general) is the manner in which it guides you to do the right…
I really like having inline source when using gdb. Code Complete, by Steve Mcconnell has an entire chapter explaining how you should proactively step through all code you write — and not just when you’re actively debugging an issue. Having…
expect is a tool built using Tcl which allows you to automate many tasks that would otherwise mean tedious repetition at the command line. While many tools come with a command line interface, they don’t lend themselves well to scripting…