#269 – June 24, 2018
You’re invited to the O'Reilly Velocity Conference in New York, NY
Now in its 11th year, the O'Reilly Velocity Conference (September 30 - October 3 in New York, NY) helps systems engineers, software developers, and DevOps teams future-proof their systems—and their careers. Come to Velocity and learn the strategies and tools you need to make your systems fast, resilient, and secure. Topics include performance, continuous delivery, DevOps, systems engineering, Kubernetes, and more. Best Price ends June 29—Register now to save up to $400!
An introduction to distributed systems
This outline accompanies a 12-16 hour overview class on distributed systems fundamentals. The course aims to introduce software engineers to the practical basics of distributed systems, through lecture and discussion. Participants will gain an intuitive understanding of key distributed systems terms, an overview of the algorithmic landscape, and explore production concerns.
Why Skylake CPUs Are Sometimes 50% Slower
I got a call that on newer hardware some performance regression tests have become slower. Not a big deal. Usually it is a bad configuration somewhere in Windows or some BIOS settings were set to non optimal values. But this time we were not able to find a setting that did bring performance back to normal.
Why We Moved From NoSQL MongoDB to PostgreSQL
A couple of years ago, we moved our code base to a monorepo, which helped us scale tremendously in terms of code reuse and overall speed of development. We are extremely proud of our ability to run a resilient service that has 99.99% availability with zero downtime upgrades.
The "Boring Software" manifesto
As software developers we are tired of the false claims made by evangelists of the latest and greatest technology. We will no longer confront them with their lack of understanding of computer science fundamentals, nor will we defend our lack of knowledge of their hyped and volatile technologies. The state of industry is forcing us to value:
YAML: probably not so great after all
I previously wrote why using JSON for human-editable configuration files is a bad idea. Today we’re going to look at some general problems with the YAML format.