#238 – November 19, 2017
Flight Rules are the hard-earned body of knowledge recorded in manuals that list, step-by-step, what to do if X occurs, and why. Essentially, they are extremely detailed, scenario-specific standard operating procedures.
How Firefox got fast again and where it’s going to get faster
Over the past seven months, we’ve been rapidly replacing major parts of the engine, introducing Rust and parts of Servo to Firefox. Plus, we’ve had a browser performance strike force scouring the codebase for performance issues, both obvious and non-obvious.
It should come as no surprise that our codebase contains a miniature compiler for our miniature query language. Our compiler looks much like any other compiler: there’s a parser which produces an abstract syntax tree (hereafter AST), a pipeline of analysers and transformations which operate on that AST, and a code generator which turns the JQL into an ElasticSearch query. (Actually, queries that are simple enough end up skipping the Elastic code generation step, instead being used by an interpreter to search an in-memory cache of jobs.)
The Senior Engineer’s Guide to Helping Others Make Decisions
We’re going to look at three different scenarios to illustrate how decisions are usually made, how they could be better, and how senior engineers should be helping others make decisions, rather than making decisions themselves.
A Guide to Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Processing (NLP) comprises a set of techniques that can be used to achieve many different objectives. Take a look at the following table to figure out which technique can solve your particular problem.