Do Things, Tell People. These are the only things you need to do to be successful*. You can get away with just doing one of the two, but that’s rare, and usually someone else is doing the other part for … Read more
Things we (finally) know about network queues How big should your queue be, and what should you do when it fills up? Many times, we implement or even deploy a networking system before we have answered those questions. Luckily, recent … Read more
There’s a phrase going around that you should “buy experiences, not things.” People, it’s claimed, think that having a lot of stuff is what’s going to make them happy. But they’re mistaken. A Lamborghini may be fun to drive for … Read more
“Thanks” to the pandemic, I’ve spent much more time figuring out how to deal with video and live streaming than I ever thought I would. It’s turned out to be a surprisingly rewarding experience. In no particular order, here are … Read more
Derek Lowe, an Arkansan by birth, got his BA from Hendrix College and his PhD in organic chemistry from Duke before spending time in Germany on a Humboldt Fellowship on his post-doc. He’s worked for several major pharmaceutical companies since … Read more
Dec 27, 2021 Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2021. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new. also: see the lists from 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011 … Read more
Writing a technical book is much harder than writing blog posts. Writing a blog post is like running a sprint while writing a book is like running a marathon. Writing my first technical book without a publisher would have been … Read more
Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life? 35 points by avgDev 48 minutes ago | hide | past | favorite | 39 comments Growing up I always enjoyed tech and was excited for all the problems tech … Read more
In 2017, I went to Facebook on a sabbatical from my faculty position at Yale. I created a team to build a storage system called Delos at the bottom of the Facebook stack (think of it as Facebook’s version of … Read more
Things to say when you are losing a tech argument The Wayback Machine – http://web.archive.org/web/20050131033632/http://www.skirsch.com:80/humor/techarg.htm That won’t scale. That’s been proven to be O(N^2) and we need a solution that’s O(NlogN). There are, of course, various export limitations on that … Read more