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  Some Thoughts on Twitter's Availability Problems

As a regular user of Twitter I've felt the waves of frustration wash over me these past couple of weeks as the service has been hit by one outage after another. This led me to start pondering the problem space [especially as it relates to what I'm currently working on at work] and deduce that the service must have some serious architectural flaws which have nothing to do with the reason usually thrown about by non-technical pundits (i.e. Ruby on Rails is to blame). Some of my suspicions ...

   Twitter,Architecture,Availability,Design     2011-08-12 07:39:21

  What Level Programmer Are You?

Everybody's talking about how programming is the skill that we all are going to need. [Except those folks who might feel that most programming could be turned into wizard-like tools. Insert long discussion about Strong AI.] But what's a programmer? Is the guy who set up his own Apache Web Server a programmer? How about the guy who created a complex Excel spreadsheet? The guy who made his own RPG level? Minecraft players? When we say "Everybody is going to have to know programming" what, e...

   Programmer,Skill,Level,Criteria     2012-02-08 10:07:41

  How To Make The Most of Your Least Productive Time

Everybody talks about mastering the art of staying productive. Not many people willingly accept that such efforts are futile. It’s impossible to stay productive 100% of the time, and this will never change. Something that I believe to be just as important, if not more so, is what we make of our least productive time. We all have the capacity to be extremely productive for some part of the day. Even the world’s grandest underachievers. But I believe that to be successful runni...

   Productive time,Limit time,Effort     2012-02-06 07:49:47

  Stop obsessing over HTML5 and CSS3

As web designers, we all seem obsessed by HTML5 and CSS3 at the moment. Endless posts, tutorials and discussion about them dominate the blogosphere. But how much are we learning that can be applied today? Don’t get me wrong. We all need to understand HTML5 and CSS3. And a lot of it can be used today. My point is that we seem to be spending a disproportionate about of time reading up on the subject when so many other areas deserve our attention. While others are reading yet another tut...

   Clients, Opinion, Web Designers     2011-06-24 00:55:06

  Where Have You Installed Your Python Packages?

Preface I am writing this article because I recently noticed in the Python community that there are several frequently asked questions: Why does running the command after installing pip result in a "executable not found" error? Why does importing a module result in a "ModuleNotFound" error? Why can I run my code in PyCharm, but it doesn't work in the command prompt? Rather than just providing solutions, it is better to teach people how to fish. To address these types of issues, you need to und...

   PYTHON,PATH,PATH_PREFIX,PACKAGE LOCATION     2023-12-17 01:03:45

  What matters in life (and what doesn’t)

I’m probably too young to be writing on this topic but observing countless souls distressed by daily life made me think hard on what is that really matters in life. Undoubtedly, there are happy and sad phases and that’s part-and-parcel of life. But what I’m really bothered about is general, daily bitching about how miserable one’s life has become. You find people complaining about work, commute, relationships, other people’s attitudes & personalit...

   Life,Matater,Relationship,Experience,Material possession,Ego     2011-10-24 11:57:27

  Functional Programming in C++

Probably everyone reading this has heard “functional programming” put forth as something that is supposed to bring benefits to software development, or even heard it touted as a silver bullet.  However, a trip to Wikipedia for some more information can be initially off-putting, with early references to lambda calculus and formal systems.  It isn’t immediately clear what that has to do with writing better software. My pragmatic summary:  A large fraction of th...

   C++,Functional programming     2012-04-28 06:16:37

  Inside Google's recruiting machine

FORTUNE -- In the hot war for talent being fought in Silicon Valley, no company has an arsenal quite like Google's. Named Fortune's Best Company to Work For in 2012, the search giant made a record 8,067 hires last year -- boosting total headcount by a third. The thirteen-year-old firm's recruiting has an almost mythical quality about it, particularly for the two million candidates applying to work there each year. In terms of elite American institutions, getting a job at Google ranks with b...

   Google,Recruiter,Contract,Recruit machine     2012-02-25 04:50:01

  Optimization Tricks used by the Lockless Memory Allocator

With the releasing of the Lockless Memory Allocator under the GPL version 3.0 license, we can now discuss more of the optimization tricks used inside it. Many of these are things you wouldn't want to use in normal code. However, when speed is the ultimate goal, sometimes we need to break a few rules and use code that is a little sneaky.The SlabA slab is a well-known technique for allocating fixed size objects. For a given object size, a chunk of memory is divided up into smaller regions of that ...

   Optimization,Memory allocation     2011-11-16 08:02:16

  How big are PHP arrays (and values) really? (Hint: BIG!)

Upfront I want to thank Johannes and Tyrael for their help in finding some of the more hidden memory usage. In this post I want to investigate the memory usage of PHP arrays (and values in general) using the following script as an example, which creates 100000 unique integer array elements and measures the resulting memory usage: <?php $startMemory = memory_get_usage(); $array = range(1, 100000); echo memory_get_usage() - $startMemory, ' bytes'; How much would you expect it to ...

   PHP,Array,Memory occupation,Garbage collection     2011-12-16 10:06:04

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