Twilight Dragon Services A decade of major cache incidents at Twitter This was co-authored with Yao Yue This is a collection of information on severe ( SEV-0 or SEV-1 , the most severe incident classifications) incidents at Twitter that were at least partially attribute... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Cocktail party ideas You don't have to be at a party to see this phenomenon in action, but there's a curious thing I regularly see at parties in social circles where people value intelligence and cleverness without simila... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services The container throttling problem This is an excerpt from an internal document David Mackey and I co-authored in April 2019. The document is excerpted since much of the original doc was about comparing possible approaches to increasin... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Some thoughts on writing I see a lot of essays framed as writing advice which are actually thinly veiled descriptions of how someone writes that basically say "you should write how I write", e.g., people who write short posts... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Some latency measurement pitfalls This is a pseudo-transcript (actual words modified to be more readable than a 100% faithful transcription) of a short lightning talk I did at Twitter a year or two ago, on pitfalls of how we use laten... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Major errors on this blog (and their corrections) Here's a list of errors on this blog that I think were fairly serious. While what I think of as serious is, of course, subjective, I don't think there's any reasonable way to avoid that because, e.g.,... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Individuals matter One of the most common mistakes I see people make when looking at data is incorrectly using an overly simplified model. A specific variant of this that has derailed the majority of work roadmaps I've ... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Culture matters Three major tools that companies have to influence behavior are incentives, process, and culture. People often mean different things when talking about these, so I'll provide an example of each so we'... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Willingness to look stupid People frequently 1 think that I'm very stupid. I don't find this surprising, since I don't mind if other people think I'm stupid, which means that I don't adjust my behavior to avoid seeming stupid, ... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services What to learn It's common to see people advocate for learning skills that they have or using processes that they use. For example, Steve Yegge has a set of blog posts where he recommends reading compiler books and ... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity A common topic of discussion among my close friends is where the bottlenecks are in our productivity and how we can execute more quickly. This is very different from what I see in my extended social c... Jan 2, 2025
Twilight Dragon Services The value of in-house expertise An alternate title for this post might be, "Twitter has a kernel team!?". At this point, I've heard that surprised exclamation enough that I've lost count of the number times that's been said to me (I... Jan 2, 2025