All Things Distributed

JANUARY 25, 2013

'All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Back-to-Basics Weekend Reading - Epidemics. By Werner Vogels on 25 January 2013 06:00 PM. | Permalink. | Comments (). My paper to read this weekend was the Alan Demers seminal paper on epidemic techniques for database replication. I realized that in 2004, before my Amazon days, I already wrote a blog post about the fundamental publications in the area of epidemics, so this seems like a good moment

Database 78

Database Scalability C++ Systems 78

Tim Kadlec

JANUARY 27, 2013

Jason Grigsby once quipped that “We’ve remade the Internet in our image….obese.” He was right, of course. Average page weight and number of connections has been increasing at a rather alarming rate. This is why I’ve been so happy to see the recent rash of posts discussing performance as a fundamental component of design. The latest comes from Mr.

Performance 64

Performance Internet Internet Design 64

The Agile Manager

JANUARY 31, 2013

Many years ago, there was a television ad that showed an intruder being chased through a building by two security guards. The guards chase him from room to room, and ultimately down a long hallway. At the mid-point of the hallway, there's a line painted on the floor and wall. On one side of the line is a large number 7, on the other is the number 8.

Technology 45

Technology Technology Innovation Programming 45

Nick Desaulniers

JANUARY 25, 2013

On an interview with Square, I made the mistake of stating that one of the benefits of working with JavaScript over C is that functions are first class in JavaScript, therefore they may be passed around. To which the interviewer replied, “Well, C can do that, what about function pointers?” What? Luckily, I was able to get out of that jam by guessing that JavaScript had a nicer syntax.

C++ 40

C++ 40

O'Reilly Software

JANUARY 18, 2013

Last week, the Internet community lost a member in the on going war against the copyright industry. While I’ve never met the deceased, or even heard of the deceased before his suicide, I’m horrified. I’m horrified that the government we are asked to put so much faith in, would give someone, not that different from myself, such a ridiculous sentence.

Internet 40

Internet Internet Government 40

Sutter's Mill

JANUARY 15, 2013

With the help of friends Robert Seacord and David Svoboda of CERT in particular, I posted a note and link to their CERT post today because people have been misunderstanding the recent Java vulnerabilities, thinking they’re somehow really C or C++ vulnerabilities because Java is implemented in C and C++. From the post: Are the Java vulnerabilities actually C and C++ vulnerabilities?

Java 40

Java C++ Virtualization Operating System 40

Nick Desaulniers

JANUARY 13, 2013

It’s all about closures. Understanding scope is paramount to coding. What can you access and what can’t you access. Closures allow us to access variables that otherwise might be awkward to pass into a function. Closures can help us out of tricky situations, but can confuse those from backgrounds with (typically) statically typed languages that may not support closing over variables.

Programming 40

Programming Code Systems Development 40