Software engineering, distributed systems, databases, and the teams that build them
Software engineering, distributed systems, databases, and the teams that build them
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
So far coding in Go has been fun. It comes with nice functionality that lets you know that the Go team really have been writing system software (useful stuff like this, and this). And then I read about the Go…
I’ve started coding in Go (golang), and I received some advice recently from Robert Griesemer, whom I was fortunate enough to sit beside at a recent Go Meetup. To learn Go, Robert suggested that I code a solution in Go…
Over 16 years, I’ve written software up-and-down the entire stack. Earliest in my career I wrote boot ROM software for specialized embedded devices. This kind of programming taught me so much about how computers really work.
Java is the predominant language of Big Data technologies. HBase, Lucene, elasticsearch, Cassandra – all are written in Java and, of course, run inside a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). There are some other important Big Data technologies, while not written in…
In my last blog post I explained why writing design documents is such a powerful approach to building well-engineered systems. But what should one document?
Many software engineers never write design documents. Design documentation takes time, and implementations often proceed so far without any documentation that if it happens, it’s an act of recording what has been done — a tedious task at the best…
My father worked for many years in Quality Assurance at Beckman, an American medical instruments firm. His job was to ensure that newly-manufactured centrifuge rotors would hold up when spun at thousands of RPMs. He used to tell me that…
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.
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.
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…
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…
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…
Valgrind comprises a bunch of very useful tools for detecting problems with your programs. I first came across it a couple of years back and find it to be excellent. In particular I use its memory profiler, which helps you…