And some software engineering things, too

Because, you know, that's just who I am.

• FIT : Failure Injection Testing

  Simulating failure starts when the FIT service pushes failure simulation metadata to Zuul. Requests matching the failure scope at Zuul are decorated with failure. This may be an added delay to a service call, or failure in reaching the persistence layer. Each injection point touched checks the request context to determine if there is a failure for that specific component. If found, the injection point simulates that failure appropriately. Below is an outline of a simulated failure, demonstrating some of the inflection points in which failure can be injected.

• Ice Cream and Distributed Systems

  Mary, Mom and Dad sat down and tried to figure out how to all agree on the problem with the fewest number of messages. Mary invented a simple scheme: when I asked her if I could have some ice cream, she messaged both my mom and dad and ask for their opinion, while asking that they didn't change their opinion until hearing back from her. If they both agreed, she'd go ahead and let them know she was going to serve dessert. If either said no, she let them know that the bowl would remain empty. The protocol, which they called two-phase commit after the frozen and liquid phases of ice cream, took four messages to complete.

• Cuckoo Filters

  If you're going to use multiple choice hashing schemes, though, you should think about using cuckoo hashing. The ability to move keys around means you should get better space utilization; for example, even with 2 choices, if your buckets can hold 4 items, cuckoo hashing can get you about 95% space utilization. The problem with cuckoo hashing in this setting is that, for a Bloom filter, you want to just keep fingerprints of keys, not the keys themselves. So, when you want to move the key, how do you figure out where to move it to -- you no longer have the key to hash?

• Instant Loading for Main Memory Databases

  While hardware limitations for fast loading have disappeared, current approaches for main memory databases fail to saturate the now available wire speeds of tens of Gbit / s. With Instant Loading, we contribute a novel CSV loading approach that allows scalable bulk loading at wire speed. This is achieved by optimizing all phases of loading for modern super-scalar multi-core CPUs.

• Message Systems in Programming: Callbacks, Events, Pub Sub, Promises, and Streams

  Messaging systems are used to communicate in larger code bases by helping decouple classes that need to know about changes or happenings in certain areas of the code . One of Object Oriented Programming‘s core concepts is encapsulation. How you decide to allow objects to talk to each other has pro’s and con’s for each method and it’s good to know your options as you can use many together in effective hybrid approaches.

  This article will cover the 5 common ones you’ll often encounter.

• Amazon Kinesis and Apache Storm: Building a Real-Time Sliding-Window Dashboard over Streaming Data

  In this whitepaper, we propose a reference architecture for ingesting, analyzing, and processing vast amounts of clickstream data generated at very high rates in a smart and cost-efficient way using Amazon Kinesis with Apache Storm. We also explore the use of Amazon ElastiCache (Redis) as an in-memory data store for aggregated counters and use of its Pub/Sub facility to publish the counters on a simple dashboard.

• Avoiding the tragedy of the anticommons

  In his white paper for the Bio-Commons, Rüdiger Trojok writes about a significantly more ambitious vision for open biology: a bio-commons that holds biological intellectual property in trust for the good of all. He also articulates the tragedy of the anticommons, the nightmarish opposite of a bio-commons in which progress is difficult or impossible because “ambiguous and competing intellectual property claims…deter sharing and weaken investment incentives.” Each individual piece of intellectual property is carefully groomed and preserved, but it’s impossible to combine the elements; it’s like a jigsaw puzzle, in which every piece is locked in a separate safe.

• Which Online Discussion Archetype Are You?

  What Mike created is a brilliant deconstruction of the various archetypes you'll encounter in any long running discussion group

• 10 Tricks to Appear Smart During Meetings

  Opinions and data and milestones are being thrown around and you don’t know your CTA from your OTA. This is a great point to go, “Guys, guys, guys, can we take a step back here?” Everyone will turn their heads toward you, amazed at your ability to silence the fray. Follow it up with a quick, “What problem are we really trying to solve?” and, boom! You’ve bought yourself another hour of looking smart.

• 15 Tricks to Appear Smart in Emails

  Whenever something good happens, always be the first to respond and always reply all. This will make you seem like a highly engaged team player.