Archive

Good Retry, Bad Retry: An Incident Story

August 18, 2024

The retries were implemented as a simple loop

How Uber Tests Payments In Production

August 11, 2024

Catch unknown unknowns, and to do it fast

Just disconnect the internet

August 04, 2024

Don't bring it up unless you are ready for some serious considerations

Building Generative AI Platform

July 28, 2024

Common components, what they do, and how they are implemented

Major Windows BSOD issue hits banks, airlines, and TV broadcasters

July 21, 2024

Thousands of Windows machines were experiencing BSOD

Ten Years with Microservices

July 14, 2024

Without microservices Allegro would not be where it is today

A Git story

July 07, 2024

Not so fun this time

The Itanic Saga

June 30, 2024

Itanium was intended to be a ubiquitous replacement for x86, but failed to compete against AMD64

Always Measure One Level Deeper

June 23, 2024

The key to good performance measurement is to make many more measurements

The documentation tradeoff

June 16, 2024

A little, sure, but be careful about more.

Queueing

June 09, 2024

An interactive study of queueing strategies

Engineering for Slow Internet

June 02, 2024

How to minimize user frustration in Antarctica

The curious case of the missing period

May 27, 2024

When Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is not simple

Programming like it’s 1977

May 19, 2024

128 bytes of RAM, no operating system, and limited types of sprites

Uncovering the Seams in Mainframes for Incremental Modernisation

May 12, 2024

Mainframe systems continue to run much of the world's computing workload

Good Ideas in Computer Science

May 05, 2024

Ideas every programmer likes and why Garbage Collection and Object Oriented Programming don’t count

Software Design Principles I Learned the Hard Way

April 28, 2024

If there’s two sources of truth, one is probably wrong. And yes, please repeat yourself.

Hardest Problem in Computer Science: Centering Things

April 21, 2024

Somehow we forgot how to center rectangles and must find our way back

The guide to git I never had

April 14, 2024

Does Git ever make you feel like Peter Griffin?

The Design Philosophy of Great Tables

April 07, 2024

Over the past 5,000 years, tables have evolved from simple grids to highly structured displays of data