March 7, 2021

Workflow Orchestration - Part 2 (Why do I care?)

An increasingly distributed and fragile world Workflow platforms are important because software engineers are increasingly adopting distributed systems in their architecture. There are two reasons for this change: 1) Users are demanding more frequent releases, feature teams, better peformance, and higher availability; 2) Providers are increasingly moving away from “use our library” (Spring Framework) to “use our APIs” (AWS, Azure, and GCP). This change is undoubtedly a good thing, however, it also introduces new problems.

March 7, 2021

Posts Of The Week 2021-03-04

Two book recommendations https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-data-intensive-applications/9781491903063/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/making-software/9780596808310/ Designing Data Intensive Applications: Don’t let the name fool you. The knowledge in this book applies to more than just data processing applications but to distributed systems in general. It is a great book for all software architects. Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It: A meta-analysis of various theories on software development processes. Is TDD effective? Is Agile just a hype or is it just misused?

February 28, 2021

Workflow Orchestration 1 - What is a workflow?

Introduction It is hard to describe what a Workflow Platform is. It is both familiar and exotic. There are aspects of the problem space we all know well: Retries, eventual consistency, message processing semantics, visibility, heartbeating, and distributed processing to name a few. Yet, when they’re all put together in a pretty package with a bow tied on top, it becomes something almost magical. It feels like seeing the iPhone for the first time: Of course you want a touch screen on a cellphone and mobile internet access.

February 22, 2021

Posts Of The Week 2021-02-18

The Peseverance rover lands on Mars. In this month, the UAE, PRC, and US all sent scientific instruments to Mars. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/science/nasa-peseverance-mars-landing.html

January 31, 2021

Posts Of The Week 2021-01-29

TextRank identifies connections between various entities in a text, and implements the concept of recommendation. A text unit recommends other related text units, and the strength of the recommendation is recursively computed based on the importance of the units making the recommendation. In the process of identifying important sentences in a text, a sentence recommends another sentence that addresses similar concepts as being useful for the overall understanding of the text

January 24, 2021

A planted tank

My wife got me a 5 gallon fish tank last Christmas. I’ve wanted to set up a planted tank – an aquarium ecosystem balanced by plants. In a planted tank, the vegetation naturally filter water by using bio waste as fertilizer, and typically contain critters like shrimp and snails to keep algae from taking over. This idea was heavily inspired by Youtube videos from Michael Langerman and Foo the Flowerhorn.

January 22, 2021

Posts Of The Week 2021-01-22

This blog is such a great example of why it is difficult to creat great software. So often you have to make impossible choices between security and backward-compatibility. Today’s Go security release fixes an issue involving PATH lookups in untrusted directories that can lead to remote execution during the go get command. We expect people to have questions about what exactly this means and whether they might have issues in their own programs.

January 6, 2021

Posts Of The Week 2021-01-08

Sascha Chua is a great resource on Emacs-y things https://sachachua.com/blog/

January 5, 2021

Posts Of The Week 2020-12-31

Maybe Emacs doesn’t need to be a fusion reactor. I only hope it continues to generate energy for many years to come. It just needs volunteers to keep the fire going. https://www.murilopereira.com/how-to-open-a-file-in-emacs/

December 22, 2020

Its Never the Customers Fault

One of the things that happen to engineers is that hard-working, productive engineers are often given leeway to make faux pas because of their contributions. Today, one of the engineers wrote on a public, widely distributed emails the following (paraphrased). We suggested the aforementioned workaround to the customers. But since they cannot do it, we will have to do an emergency release instead. There are two parts here. One, the engineer suggested a workaround that will quickly solve the customers.