Twilight Dragon Services Measurement, benchmarking, and data analysis are underrated A question I get asked with some frequency is: why bother measuring X, why not build something instead? More bluntly, in a recent conversation with a newsletter author, his comment on some future meas... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Against essential and accidental complexity In the classic 1986 essay, No Silver Bullet , Fred Brooks argued that there is, in some sense, not that much that can be done to improve programmer productivity. His line of reasoning is that programm... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services How do cars do in out-of-sample crash testing? Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks. With spe... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Finding the Story This is an archive of an old pseudonymously written post from the 90s from someone whose former pseudonym seems to have disappeared from the internet. I see that Star Trek: Voyager has added a new cha... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services A simple way to get more value from tracing A lot of people seem to think that distributed tracing isn't useful, or at least not without extreme effort that isn't worth it for companies smaller than FB. For example, here are a couple of public ... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services A simple way to get more value from metrics We spent one day 1 building a system that immediately found a mid 7 figure optimization (which ended up shipping). In the first year, we shipped mid 8 figures per year worth of cost savings as a resul... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services How (some) good corporate engineering blogs are written I've been comparing notes with people who run corporate engineering blogs and one thing that I think is curious is that it's pretty common for my personal blog to get more traffic than the entire corp... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services The growth of command line options, 1979-Present My hobby : opening up McIlroy’s UNIX philosophy on one monitor while reading manpages on the other. The first of McIlroy's dicta is often paraphrased as "do one thing and do it well", which is shorten... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Suspicious discontinuities If you read any personal finance forums late last year, there's a decent chance you ran across a question from someone who was desperately trying to lose money before the end of the year. There are a ... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services 95%-ile isn't that good Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn't help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think i... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Algorithms interviews: theory vs. practice When I ask people at trendy big tech companies why algorithms quizzes are mandatory, the most common answer I get is something like "we have so much scale, we can't afford to have someone accidentally... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Files are fraught with peril This is a psuedo-transcript for a talk given at Deconstruct 2019. To make this accessible for people on slow connections as well as people using screen readers, the slides have been replaced by in-lin... 2 jan 2025