Issue #91
Curated list of blogs, videos, papers, podcasts on programming and distributed systems.
May you live in interesting times.
— Austen Chamberlain
Posts
Pioneers of Modern Computer Graphics Recognized with ACM A.M. Turing Award
Hanrahan and Catmull’s Innovations Paved the Way for Today’s 3-D Animated Films - #awards #acm
You don't want quality time, you want garbage time
You can't get quality time by chasing after it - #avoidboringpeople
Urbit is a principled approach to system design and programming, but it's often not obvious what those principles are. - #urbit #blog
What I don't see addressed as often is how to translate one into the other, using the CAP (or PACELC or whatever) reasoning about Availability to help us think about availability. In reality, are Available systems more available than Consistent systems? - #brooker
Being a Short Treatise on the Nature of Failure; How Failure is Evaluated; How Failure is Attributed to Proximate Cause; and the Resulting New Understanding of Patient Safety - #web #mit
Mary Dash, Chief of the Congressional Correspondence and Quality Review Branch of the Internal Revenue Service, wrote these excellent writing tips. - #plainlanguage #gov
Finding a schedule that satisfies all constraints can be computationally difficult. The following sections present two examples of employee scheduling problems, and show how to solve them using the CP-SAT solver. - #developers #google
We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead
The name was chosen by vote among the team, and the selected name was RAID, which is the name of a brand of insecticide whose advertisements in the United States use the tag line “Kills bugs dead.” The icon for the program was a can of bug spray, naturally. - #devblogs #microsoft
The reckless, infinite scope of web browsers
They should have long ago focused on competing in terms of performance and stability, not in adding new web “features”. This is absolutely ridiculous, and it has to stop. - #drewdevault
Anatomy of my Kubernetes Cluster
A year ago, I decided I would build my own Kubernetes cluster. As a software engineer, I either use a local single-node Kubernetes cluster, or a remote multi-node cluster, to test my work on a daily basis. I wanted to have the benefits of both, that is being able to use a multi-node cluster, without any of the latencies you can experience while working with a remote environment. - #ttt
The good parts of AWS - A visual summary
The good parts of AWS, an Ebook by Daniel Vassallo and Josh Pschorr, gives an insider view of some of the multiple AWS services. The goal is to help the reader find his own default choices when faced with a technical decision. - #hassenchaieb
Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split
When the operating system grew too big to fit on the first RK05 disk pack (their root filesystem) they let it leak into the second one, which is where all the user home directories lived (which is why the mount was called /usr). - #busybox #lists
Videos
Dave Rensin: Chaos Engineering for People Systems
Scaling Distributed Teams Around the Globe
Ranganathan Balashanmugam talks about how one distributed organization (with bases in India and Australia) has applied distributed systems patterns to scaling distributed teams' processes and further improved them. He shares examples of what went right, what went wrong, what they've learned as they've built a network of effective distributed teams across multiple countries, in multiple timezones. - #infoq
Paper
Bicycles for the mind have to be see-through
The hope is that rewarding curiosity will stimulate curiosity in a virtuous cycle, so that more people are motivated to study and reflect on the difference between good vs bad design and good vs bad architecture, even as the study takes place over a lifetime of specialization in other domains. - #akkartik