I recently came across a talk on YouTube titled History of Software Engineering, given by Paolo Perrotta. Normally I find online videos to have a low information-to-time ratio, but this one was excellent. It’s not too long, with plenty of humour, and makes many serious points that resonated with me.
Book Review: Cassandra High Availability
Packt recently asked me to review their new publication Cassandra High Availability, written by Robbie Strickland.
I’ve worked with Cassandra in the past — early designs of Loggly‘s 2nd generation Log analytics platform used Cassandra as its authoritative store for log data, but we ended up pulling it and using elasticsearch as both the store and search engine.
Software Development for Infrastructure
Bjarne Stroustrup
has another very interesting paper on his website. Titled Software Development for Infrastructure, it discusses some key ideas for building software that has “…more stringent correctness, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability requirements than non-essential applications.” It is not a long paper, but offers useful observations and guidelines for building such software systems.
Eudyptula Challenge
The Eudyptula Challenge is a series of programming tasks, with the goal of getting one up-to-speed on Linux kernel programming. When I first heard about it, it immediately intrigued me. I’ve written a few production Linux kernel modules in my time — mostly device drivers — so I started the challenge today.
Drop, Throttle, or Buffer
Real-time — or near real-time — data pipelines are all the rage these days. I’ve built one myself, and they are becoming key components of many SaaS platforms. SaaS Analytics, Operations, and Business Intelligence systems often involve moving large amounts of data, received over the public Internet, into complex backend systems. And managing the incoming flow of data to these pipelines is key.
Measure Everything
Tomorrow I join the team at InfluxDB, something I’m really excited about. I’m really looking forward to coding in Go full-time — it’s a language with real promise, a nice clean tool chain, and a very active community.
Continue reading Measure Everything
Is node.js just a stopgap?
Something just doesn’t feel right about node.js.
After coding in it for almost a year, it’s been fun, but I’ve decided it’s just a waypoint to somewhere better.
Come for the Features, Stay for the Uptime
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what makes computer services and products sticky — what makes users and customers come back again and again to what you’ve built. There are lots of ways to summarize it, but when it comes to systems that help technical people run their own systems, they come for the features, but they stay for the uptime.
Evolving a language in and for the real world: C++ 1991-2006
Bjarne Stroustrup has great paper on his website titled Evolving a language in and for the real world: C++ 1991-2006. It provides fascinating insights on the development of the language, the challenges involved, and discusses interesting design ideas. If you have even a basic understanding of C++, it’s a such a worthwhile read.
Continue reading Evolving a language in and for the real world: C++ 1991-2006
Replicating SQLite using Raft Consensus
SQLite is a “self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine”. However, it doesn’t come with replication built in, so if you want to store mission-critical data in it, you better back it up. The usual approach is to continually copy the SQLite file on every change.
I wanted SQLite, I wanted it distributed, and I really wanted a more elegant solution for replication. So rqlite was born.