Posts

Stream processing and related abstractions have become all the rage following the rise of systems like Apache Kafka, Samza, and the Lambda architecture. Applying the idea of immutable, append-only event sourcing means we’re storing more data than ever before. However, as the cost of storage continues to decline, it’s becoming more feasible to store more data for longer periods of time. With immutability, how the data lives isn’t interesting anymore. It’s all about how it moves. ...

Developers deal with recruiter emails on a daily basis. It’s frustrating because it’s almost always a shotgun approach, but occasionally you get something that strays from the path and, delightfully, it stands out. It’s refreshing to have someone who has actually taken the time to determine your skill set, technology background, and how you spend your free time with respect to software. You feel like they at least have an inkling of who you are. On the other hand, it’s irritating to be bombarded by contract-to-hire offers which aren’t even remotely tailored to you. What’s worse is when it’s ten different emails from ten different people working for the same recruiting agency. ...

I read a lot of research papers and other nerdy computer science things in my spare time. I’m also a huge fan of Paper We Love, which is an awesome repository of academic CS papers and a community of people who read, share, and present them. For the purposes of posterity and information-sharing, I thought it would be a good idea to share some of the nerdy things I read or watch like various papers, blog posts, and talks—all related to computer science. That’s why I’m tweeting a new piece of CS literature every day with the hashtag #CSLOTD and maintaining a GitHub repo containing that content called CS Literature of the Day. ...

In the past, I’ve looked at nanomsg and why it’s a formidable alternative to the well-regarded ZeroMQ. Like ZeroMQ, nanomsg is a native library which markets itself as a way to build fast and scalable networking layers. I won’t go into detail on how nanomsg accomplishes this since my analysis of it already covers that fairly extensively, but instead I want to talk about a Go implementation of the protocol called Mangos. ((Full disclosure: I am a contributor on the Mangos project, but only because I was a user first!)) If you’re not familiar with nanomsg or Scalability Protocols, I recommend reading my overview of those first. ...

When I posted my Dissecting Message Queues article last summer, it understandably caused some controversy. I received both praise and scathing comments, emails asking why I didn’t benchmark X and pull requests to bump the numbers of Y. To be honest, that analysis was more of a brain dump from my own test driving of various message queues than any sort of authoritative or scientific study—it was far from the latter, to say the least. The qualitative discussion was pretty innocuous, but the benchmarks and supporting code were the target of a lot of (valid) criticism. In retrospect, it was probably irresponsible to publish them, but I was young and naive back then; now I’m just mostly naive. ...