New blog post: Opinionated thoughts on SQL
Short email, to let you know I have a new blog post out, sharing my thoughts on and pet peeves with SQL databases. I was going to send this as a newsletter...
Notes on some PostgreSQL implementation details
Ranger update Seriously friends he has gotten so large. He knows his name and comes when called, like, 80% of the time. He turned four months old today, just...
What does a cache do?
I’ve recently had cause to work on scaling up a web application. It’s got a pretty traditional architecture: A CDN in front of a fast native code web server...
HTTP Pipelining, S3, and gg
Ranger update 22lbs at last weigh-in! His favorite place continues to be "curled up at our feet chewing his favorite bone": S3 and pipelining A few weeks...
Tagged unions are overrated
Among engineers who have strong opinions about programming languages, one particularly widely-held take is in the value of tagged unions, as well as language...
On Reasoning about Code
Ranger update Ranger has now gotten enough vaccinations to go for walks! This is very exciting. He was 19.6lbs at last weighing, now crossing twice his...
Alive2 and missed-optimization bug reports
First, a Ranger update. He is a growing healthy boy, up 50% by weight over the last two weeks. This week, I want to do a quick writeup of something I tweeted...
Some notes on code review
A brief personal note I missed a newsletter last week, due to a combination of procrastination and MIT Mystery Hunt, but also due to adopting this little guy...
Tracing JITs and coverage-guided fuzzers
By happenstance, I am friends with a handful of engineers that happen to have spent substantial amounts of time working on both the PyPy project and on...
Situated Social Software
(Probably) no new letters for the rest of this year — going to take a holiday break. Thanks for subscribing and reading this newsletter, and you can find...
Notes on Amazon Lambda
First, a callback to an older post: Itamar Turner-Trauring did a neat writeup on using Cachegrind to deterministic performance analysis, inspired by my post...
Papers I love: gg
I’ve been playing with Amazon Lambda the last few weeks for a side project, and during the process I’ve gone from kinda infuriated with and baffled by Lambda...
Determinism in software engineering
A few weeks back I wrote about nondeterministic performance and the problems it poses for benchmarking. That reminded me that I’ve got a bunch of thoughts...
Benchmarking and theories of performance
I just this week finished reading Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I’d encountered many or most of the ideas in the book by reference, but...
Performance engineering requires stable benchmarks
Reproducible benchmarks are essential to doing performance engineering. In order to know if a change had an impact on performance, you have to be able to...
Test size and scope
It’s been A Week I have a 60%-written post on software performance I was hoping to send this week, but in retrospect it was pretty foolish to expect I would...
Three approaches to edge cases in data models
Edge case poisoning This post is somewhat a response to Hillel Wayne’s recent post on edge case poisoning. It should be understandable without reading his...
Once more, with feeling…
Sorry for the second email. It seems that I failed to actually disable link tracking on the previous post. I’m pretty sure that this time I’ve got it fixed...
What's worth optimizing?
Broken links in last week’s email Many people reported that all the links in last week’s post were dead. Thanks for letting me know, and I’m sorry about...
Welcome to my newsletter! And: Performance as hardware utilization
Hello! Welcome to the newsletter. I started this year with a goal of writing weekly posts on my blog, but ever since COVID-19 lockdowns started, I've been...