Better Dev Link

If programmers were just more disciplined, more professional, they’d write better software. All they need is a code of conduct telling them how to work like those of us who’ve worked it out. The above statement is true, which is a good thing for those of us interested in improving the state of software and in helping our fellow professionals to improve their craft. However, it’s also very difficult and inefficient to apply, in addition to being entirely unnecessary. In the common parlance of our industry, “discipline doesn’t scale”.

If you work with ElasticSearch, you know it’s powerful but it’s a beast to operate. Even restarting process, if done without careful planing, may cause outage due to a constant balancing and high load. In this article, botify labs shares with us their experience operating a super a 600TB+ ES cluster. At the end, they are hinting they are moving away from ElasticSearch too.

Put away your pumpkin spice lattés and plastic skeletons, because we’re here to talk about what sends chills down your spine and goes “ ERROR: primary database disk full” in the night. Ask not for whom the pager beeps: it beeps for thee.

Stitchfix has to find the colors of clothes from their images. We’ll get into depth about the computational part: current computer vision algorithm, some of their process in coming up with that algorithm, and ideas for what we’ll do next.

Cybercrime rewards innovative organizations. These can innovate at the tactical level (e.g. new or updated tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP)), the strategic level (e.g. new monetisation methods), or at the operational level—the management of resources and personnel to achieve strategic objectives. This is operational art.

“Why doesn’t Tiger King play on my phone?” — a Netflix member via Twitter. Distributed systems are hard to debug because we have many moving parts. Investigating a video streaming failure consists of inspecting all aspects of a member account. This is how Netflix designs their tracing infrastructure to power a troubleshooting tool for streaming sessions.

Any database schema is likely to have plenty of text fields. In this article, I divide text fields into three categories: small text like varchar(n), large text, and medium text.

When I ask my colleagues why mmap is faster than system calls, the answer is inevitably “system call overhead”: the cost of crossing the boundary between the user space and the kernel. It turns out that this overhead is more nuanced than I used to think, so let’s look under the hood to understand the performance differences.

You’ve gone through the motions and play-acted a disaster recovery scenario, but despite spending a lot on the production, it’s not real. What you have is a fairy tale: “Once upon a time, in theory, if everything works perfectly, we have a plan to survive the disasters we thought of in advance.” In practice, it’s more likely to be a nightmare.

Nextflix is famous for “Chaos Engineering” where we break the production’s component on purpose to see how the system responds and recovers. This is a book about Chaos Engineering, and more important, it’s free right now.