I’ve interested in, and been listening to podcasts for 8 years. My very first book contribution was a “how to” on podcasting. A lot has happened since then and I must have spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours listening to podcasts. Yet, it was only about a month ago I discovered Hypercritical, a fewContinue reading “Hypercritical”
Monthly Archives: December 2012
The Insane Story of Ithkuil
Few people know that in 2006 I was determined to drop out of computer science completely. After an extremely busy year doing my master’s in networks & distributed systems at TCD and a decade and a half of programming under my belt, I had enough of it all. I wanted to do something to doContinue reading “The Insane Story of Ithkuil”
Node.js and The Case of the Blocked Event Loop
In Pick Your Battles I listed a few problems that we had in our production deployment of a big node.js codebase. Some people asked me to elaborate on one in particular: “Oh, our node.js server processes seem to freeze up for a long time (seconds) from time to time, why does that happen?” So, whyContinue reading “Node.js and The Case of the Blocked Event Loop”
Message Queue-Based Load Balancing
When you run a big mission critical web app, you have to two big challenges on the operational side: Handling failure — failure is all around: servers fail, processes crash, datacenters blow up. Scaling as traffic increases and decreases. A tool in use by practically everybody to solve both of these challenges are load balancers. Here’s howContinue reading “Message Queue-Based Load Balancing”
Zef’s Law
Wikipedia on Murphy’s law: Murphy’s law is an adage or epigram that is typically stated as: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”. Actually, the way I always heard Murphy’s law be formulated is “Everything that can go wrong with eventually go wrong.” However he said it, after running operations and release management forContinue reading “Zef’s Law”
The Innovator’s Challenge
Last week I published an article on picking battles. When I read comments on twitter, reddit and hacker news, the article was often summarised as “don’t jump on all the new stuff that people invent, stick with what you know and has been in use for years.” If that were true — wouldn’t that lead to aContinue reading “The Innovator’s Challenge”
The Glorious Days of CGI
CPUs barely get faster anymore, it’s physically difficult to do so. What we can do, however, is build many CPUs and strap them onto a board. That’s much cheaper and easier. Whereas before we simply waited a year for CPUs to catch up with your software’s performance requirements, today we have to approach the problemContinue reading “The Glorious Days of CGI”
Pick Your Battles
So, you decided to build a real application. Not a toy. Not a hobby project. Something that’s supposed to last, supposed to scale, supposed to work and remain reliable. If you’re in any way like me, I bet right now you’re browsing the interwebs like crazy to find the hottest new technology you get yourContinue reading “Pick Your Battles”
How To Make Remote Work
When we moved to Poland I did not speak a lot of Polish. In fact, I still don’t, but that’s another story. I definitely was not close to the level where I could actually function in an office environment. When it came to finding a job there I had to ask myself: would a PolishContinue reading “How To Make Remote Work”
How Great Leaders Inspire Actions
Why -> How -> What. That is all.
