Hello again. I had no time to give proper overview notes lately, but I hope you are still reading and enjoying my recommendations ;)
Links of the week
User settings, Lamport clocks and lightweight formal methods
“With two browsers and a single backend (single storage), different things can happen. A user can click settings in one browser, and then different settings in another one. There can be transient network problems so the browsers fail to send the up-to-date settings to the backend. The user can click back and forth the settings several times, or restart the browser.“
“Unfortunately, since all of your services run on servers (whether you like it or not), someone in that supply chain is charging you based on their peak load. Part of the “cloud premium” for load balancers, serverless computing, and small VMs is based on how much extra capacity your cloud provider needs to build in order to handle their peak load. You’re paying for someone’s peak load anyway!“
The disproportionate influence of early tech decisions
“A common theme is that all of these were known to be very imperfect implementations even when they were originally added, but they were added anyway in the name of velocity, with an implicit assumption baked in that they’d be shored up and improved later when there were more resources and slack time to do so. And although they certainly were shored up, they never improved by all that much.“
Function Pipelines: Building Functional Programming Into PostgreSQL Using Custom Operators
“We built function pipelines- without modifying the parser or anything that would require a fork of PostgreSQL- by taking advantage of three of the many ways that PostgreSQL enables extensibility: custom types, custom functions, and custom operators.“
“Managers tend to have a strong sense of the business’ needs, and that gives them the superpower of finding the intersection of your interests and the business’ priorities. That translation is a creative pursuit, so don’t leave this entirely to your manager: participate as well! Brainstorm projects, research how folks at other companies have pursued similar goals, educate your manager on aspects of your goals they don’t know much about“
It’s time to leave the leap second in the past
“In 2017, Cloudflare posted a very detailed article about the impact of a leap second on the company’s public DNS. The root cause of the bug that affected their DNS service was the belief that time cannot go backward. The code took the upstream time values and fed them to Go’s rand.Int63n() function. The rand.Int63n() function promptly panicked because the argument was negative, which caused the DNS server to fail.“
Book of the week
Inside the Black Box: A Simple Guide to Quantitative and High-Frequency Trading
Do you have any more links our community should read? Feel free to post them on the comments.
Have a nice week. 😉
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