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Mt Rainier's Grand Park really is spectacular, and worth the (quite stiff) walk. The pictures don't capture the sheer bigness of the mountain, or the awesomeness of the lenticular clouds.
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New blog post on some rules for effective writing: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/09/21/audience.htmlBottom line: write for somebody. Have somebody (or a kind of person) in mind that you're trying to...
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Small side project: laser engraving sharpening angles onto all my knives. German stainless kitchen knives mostly get 15 degrees per side, while particle metallurgy stainless gets either 10 or 12...
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All my knives are stainless, and almost all are hand made. All go in the dishwasher (ok, nearly all, not the ones with unstabilized wood handles).
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New blog post, on the assumptions that distributed systems make, and how thinking about those assumptions as 'optimistic' or 'pessimistic' can lead to better designs:...
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From Gray and Lamport, "Consensus on Transaction Commit", 2004: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/consensus-on-transaction-commit/
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The video of my ATC'23 talk on "On-Demand Container Loading in AWS Lambda" is now available: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Wden61jKWvsI tried to take a high-level view of the paper, focusing on why we...
View ArticleArticle 9
Very cool work from Anand et al at SOSP'23: "Blueprint: A Toolchain for Highly-Reconfigurable Microservices" (https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3600006.3613138). I have a lot to say about this paper,...
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They show metastable behavior from caches, from load, from capacity, and from GC in context of their framework.I love seeing work like this look at metastable failures, and more modelling approaches to...
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New blog post, on the role of time in distributed systems, and how to think about using physical time: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/11/27/about-time.html
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Interested in adopting formal methods, or exploring how they can help you and your team move faster? Check out this talk from Ankush Desai and Bikash Behera from #reinvent2023:...
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I love Ankush's point about how thinking formally has value of its own, and how domain-specific languages like P help with that process. You get value from formal methods before you even start model...
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Formal methods are complimentary to traditional testing approaches. A formal approach helps find bugs that are easy to miss in testing (even with advanced testing approaches like deterministic...
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Formal methods help us move faster, by exploring the design space more boldly, finding optimizations and improvements that are hard to reason about.
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Ankush doesn't even touch on one of my favorite outcomes of formal methods: implementations of protocols in languages like P, PlusCal, and TLA+ serve as fantastic, crisp, protocol documentation.Being...
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This is the coolest demo of transmission line effects I've ever seen. Just imagine Oliver Heaviside was around to see this. Would have blown his mind.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AXv49dDQJwHey,...
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If you want to understand database isolation levels, you could do a lot worse than reading the SQL implementations of Martin Kleppmann's Hermitage tests: https://github.com/ept/hermitage
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