rqlite at the San Francisco Go Meetup
I made a presentation on rqlite tonight at the San Francisco Go Meetup. It was an enjoyable evening, and I had a chance to discuss why I built rqlite, how it works, and where it might go in the future.
Philip O'Toole
Software engineering, distributed systems, databases, and the teams that build them
Philip O'Toole
Software engineering, distributed systems, databases, and the teams that build them
Tag programming
What I learned from programming databases
Programming a database is fascinating work. I’ve been deeply involved with developing open source databases for the past two years and programming a database is possibly the most instructive project one can ever complete as a software developer. What’s really…
rqlite and Hashicorp Raft Consensus
I’ve started replacing go-raft within rqlite with the implementation from Hashicorp. go-raft is no longer maintained, and I’ve good experience with the Hashicorp code, due to my work with InfluxDB and hraftd. I’m also going to change the API, so…
New browser interface for Ekanite
Ekanite is an open-source Syslog server with built in log search. Thanks to some nice work by Fabian Zaremba, Ekanite now supports searching your logs via a browser. If you’d like to understand more about the design and development of…
Revisiting syslog-gollector
It’s been 18 months since the first commit to my first significant Go project — syslog-gollector. After an initial burst of activity to create a functional Syslog Collector that streamed to Apache Kafka, the source code hadn’t been updated much…
Designing a search system for log data — part 3
This is the last part of a 3-part series “Designing and building a search system for log data”. Be sure to check out part 1 and part 2. In the last post we examined the design and implementation of Ekanite,…
Designing a search system for log data — part 2
This is the second part of a 3-part series “Designing and building a search system for log data”. Be sure to check out part 1. Part 3 follows this post. In the previous post I outlined some of the high-level…
Designing a search system for log data — part 1
This is the first part of a 3-part series “Designing and building a search system for log data”. Part 2 is here, and part 3 is here. For the past few years, I’ve been building indexing and search systems, for…
Contributing to InfluxDB
When you’d like to contribute to an open-source project it can be difficult to know where to start. Check out my latest post for the InfluxDB blog, explaining how we on the Core team have curated a set of issues,…
Testing InfluxDB Storage Engines
Another post for the InfluxDB blog — on testing the storage engines within InfluxDB. You can check it out here.
Building a distributed key-value store using Raft
Hashicorp provide a nice implementation of the Raft consensus protocol, and it’s at the heart of InfluxDB (amongst other systems). I wanted to experiment with a simple system built using this particular Raft implementation, so was inspired by raftd to…
Coding like it’s 1999
“Run into an obstacle in what you’re working on? Hmm, I wonder what’s new online. Better check.” If you haven’t already, you should start reading Paul Graham’s essays. In one on philosophy, Graham believes that many of the answers provided…
The strange economics of open-source software
I always use the names of economists for my machines’ hostnames. keynes, friedman, marx, fisher, ricardo. So every so often the strange economics of open-source software hits me.
Who watches the watchers?
I’ve written my first post for the InfluxDB blog. In it I discuss the new statistics and monitoring system built into InfluxDB, starting with the 0.9.4 release. Functionality like this is critical when it comes to running a distributed database…
400 days of Go
It’s been 418 days since my first Github commit of Go code. In that time I’ve written a Syslog-to-Kafka producer, a Raft-based distributed SQLite database, a near real-time log search system, and become a core developer of InfluxDB.
Leadership without Management
I came across another great video about software engineering management, this time by Bryan Cantrill. It’s a really great talk, and discussed in-depth — with plenty of humour thrown in — the importance of Mission to high-performing software developers.
Gophercon 2015
This past week I attended Gophercon 2015, in Denver, CO. It was also a chance to get together with the rest of the InfluxDB team. And because the Go community is still relatively young and small, it was a great…
Software development: it’s got nothing to do with computers
Well, almost nothing. Obviously it’s got something to do with computers since developers spend so much of their time in front of one. But software development is actually all about people. And successful software development even more so.
Increasing bleve indexing performance with sharding
Search is everywhere. Once you’ve built search systems, you see its potential application in many places. So when I came across bleve, an open-source search library written in Go, I was interested in learning more about its feature set and…
Code reviews still rule
Recently at InfluxDB we discussed how code reviews fit in during the various stages of development. It’s great to see the team reach consensus about how we should develop software. It made me think more deeply about why I remain…
History of Software Engineering
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…