Twilight Dragon Services What's worked in Computer Science: 1999 v. 2015 In 1999, Butler Lampson gave a talk about the past and future of “computer systems research” . Here are his opinions from 1999 on "what worked". Yes Maybe No Virtual memory Parallelism Capabilities Ad... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Infinite disk Hardware performance “obviously” affects software performance and affects how software is optimized. For example, the fact that caches are multiple orders of magnitude faster than RAM means that block... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Why Intel added cache partitioning Typical server utilization is between 10% and 50%. Google has demonstrated 90% utilization without impacting latency SLAs . Xkcd estimated that Google owns 2 million machines . If you estimate an amor... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Slowlock Every once in awhile, you hear a story like “there was a case of a 1-Gbps NIC card on a machine that suddenly was transmitting only at 1 Kbps, which then caused a chain reaction upstream in such a way... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Steve Yegge's prediction record I try to avoid making predictions 1 . It's a no-win proposition: if you're right, hindsight bias makes it look like you're pointing out the obvious. And most predictions are wrong. Every once in a whi... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Reading postmortems I love reading postmortems. They're educational, but unlike most educational docs, they tell an entertaining story. I've spent a decent chunk of time reading postmortems at both Google and Microsoft. ... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Slashdot and Sourceforge If you've followed any tech news aggregator in the past week (the week of the 24th of May, 2015), you've probably seen the story about how SourceForge is taking over admin accounts for existing projec... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services The googlebot monopoly TIL that Bell Labs and a whole lot of other websites block archive.org, not to mention most search engines. Turns out I have a broken website link in a GitHub repo, caused by the deletion of an old we... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services A defense of boring languages Boring languages are underrated. Many appear to be rated quite highly, at least if you look at market share. But even so, they're underrated. Despite the popularity of Dan McKinley's "choose boring te... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Advantages of monorepos Here's a conversation I keep having: Someone : Did you hear that Facebook/Google uses a giant monorepo? WTF! Me : Yeah! It's really convenient, don't you think? Someone : That's THE MOST RIDICULOUS TH... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services We used to build steel mills near cheap power. Now that's where we build datacenters Why are people so concerned with hardware power consumption nowadays? Some common answers to this question are that power is critically important for phones, tablets, and laptops and that we can put m... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Reading citations is easier than most people think It's really common to see claims that some meme is backed by “studies” or “science”. But when I look at the actual studies, it usually turns out that the data are opposed to the claim. Here are the la... Jan 2, 2025