Board

The last two years, I've hosted my blog with ghost.org [https://ghost.org/]. As the blog has grown, so have the costs. Later this year, I'll probably move to hosting it myself on AWS for a fraction of the cost ($0.25/mo vs. $25/mo), all with less than 100 lines of code. Self-hosting on cloud infrastructure has become so easy that I have to consider it. I think SaaS (in general) will start to look more like cars. Cars need maintenance and aren't fixable or debuggable by the average person, yet w

Linux announced that Rust would be the second official language supported in the codebase. That's impressive, considering Linux has been around for 30 years! Engineering discipline. Only five-ish* languages are approved to use within Google (Java, C++, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, and Python, as I recall). Languages like Haskell or frameworks like Node.js are forbidden. Why? More languages means more tooling and workflows to support. More institutional knowledge needs to be shared and more speci

Many of the DevOps themes I write about (monorepos, package managers, WebAssembly, Docker, etc.) have something to do with sharing code. Programs today are often a Frankenstein combination of different open-source libraries. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to manage all of the dependencies (see Reflections on 10,000 Hours of Programming [https://matt-rickard.com/reflections-on-10-000-hours-of-programming/]). How code gets used and reused should be important for developer productivi

I lived in NYC for six years. I probably spent 1 minute/day on and waiting for elevators during that time. Spending at least 1.5 days of your life with elevators, one can't help to think about what they are doing. Hard disk-seeking algorithms influenced many elevator algorithms (or maybe the other way around?). One way to think about it: hard disks need to read ("pick up") and write ("drop off") requests at different locations on the disk ("floors"). Here are some elevator algorithms, starting

This article is a chapter from my new book Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 . The first releas...

Every year, Datadog analyzes anonymized data from its platform. Datadog's wide variety of customers and breadth within a company's infrastructure make the insights interesting. For example, this year, they looked at serverless adoption. You can read the full report here. Serverless has gone from a punchline "there are still servers in serverless" to a generally accepted fact of infrastructure. As cloud matures and the "knobs" become more apparent, the distinction between serverless vs. not is.

It seems like SQLite has shown up in more places everywhere you look. SQLite is an implementation of a SQL database engine as a C-language library. That means SQLite can be embedded into binaries, run in the browser, on edge devices, or anywhere else. * I'm all-in on server-side SQLite (5-9-22) * JSON and Virtual Columns in SQLite * Wp-SQLite: WordPress running on an SQLite database * Sqldiff: SQLite Database Difference Utility * High-Availability SQLite * Ask HN: Have you used SQLite as

My own content creation philosophy, explored through my own personal story with React

This is part one of the Crossover Project. Part two is here and part three is here. I sat in front of Mat, idly chatting about tech and cuisine. Before now, I had known him mostly for his cooking pictures on Twitter, the kind that made me envious of suburbanites and their 75,000 BTU woks. But now he was the test subject for my new project, to see if it was going to be fruitful or a waste of time.

Hartley writes about full stack software development, marketing, and web scraping. Based in Boston, MA.

We've seen significant benefits from introducing microservices, which have allowed teams to scale the delivery of independently deployed and maintained services. Unfortunately, we've also seen [...]

Everybody knows eBPF is fast, but how?

Often, our instinct is to build for optionality. What if we change databases? What if we change clouds? We target the Least Common Denominator (LCD) interface to avoid vendor lock-in and make sure our software is portable – after all, Optimization is Fragile. LCD interfaces look like targeting the S3 API, a generic PubSub implementation, or vanilla ANSI SQL. LCD interfaces are good enough most of the time, but when we need to run a specialized workload, sometimes they don't perform how we'd lik

Part I: First-generation Part II: Client/Server Part III: Distributed My hatred of CVS means that I see SVN as the most pointless project ever started. — Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux Kernel and Git The third generation of VCS was distributed. It's best to describe it through the story of Git. Larry McVoy had worked on a VCS called Sun WorkShop TeamWare in the 90s. TeamWare mirrored many of the features of Subversion and Perforce but built on SCCS. In 1998, McVoy saw the issues with th

The Lindy Effect is a heuristic that the future life expectancy of non-perishable entities is proportional to their age. The longer something has already lasted, the higher likelihood it will continue to endure. – Observations of the Lindy Effect Secure Shell or SSH has been the de facto way to connect to a server remotely. It's been around since 1995. It's simple on the surface – it uses public-key cryptography (or a password) to authenticate on a remote server. The connection protocol can ope

How did Kubernetes push git to its limit? Some stories from my time (2016-2019) working on Kubernetes. No atomicity across subprojects – In 2016, Kubernetes was still a monorepo. Everything was developed in a single repository. This meant that developers could reuse CI infrastructure easily and ensure that changes to the different components (e.g., kube-proxy, kube-apiserver, kubelet) would work together. However, downstream projects needed to build on the API. That meant vendoring parts of Ku

ARM chipsets like AWS Gravitron and Google Cloud/Azure Ampere have quickly gained adoption. There are many enterprise tailwinds: supply chain, licensing, performance, cost, etc. But I've been most surprised with how quickly developers have adopted ARM in production. Even with superior cost and performance, there's gravity to running a specific architecture. Ten years ago, switching off Intel would have been a long, painful transition. So why are more application developers running ARM? * Eph

Chances are you’ve never heard of Igalia, the open source consultancy. Yet you’re almost certainly using something that Igalia helped build.

Kubernetes is also becoming more embedded in other systems, so its adoption may not be as visible as it once was.

Functional and event-driven programming – for the masses. Or how I once wrote a Kubernetes-based CI/CD system in Excel0. Functional programming has been around forever. Lisp is the second oldest programming language1. Now that Excel is Turing Complete with the LAMBDA function, it might finally be the time that Excel and spreadsheet languages might be the trojan horse for introducing full lambda calculus to the masses. Visual Basic and Excel built-in functions are limited in their expressivenes

Technology companies were right to care so much about vendor lock-in in the last two decades. In the past, developers were burned by IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle services, often with few alternatives and price gouging. But to align your strategy so vehemently against the same type of lock-in in the cloud era would be wrong. Vendor lock-in still exists (switching costs will always be one core driver of competitive advantage), but the calculation is much different. Lock-in is a trade-off between po

Long term, will v8 Isolates become the basis of a generalized computing platform, or will containers1 (or some other type of software container)? Or will there continue to be separate infrastructure, application, and edge runtimes? The isolation technologies are complementary today – they make different trade-offs with cold starts, security boundaries, and resource profiles. You'll find v8 Isolates powering edge functions like Cloudflare Workers (but not Lambda@Edge). However, there are many pu

People are avoiding each other at work and the self-service is on the rise. Software is democratizing every department. Product managers can run analytics and workflows without developers, developers can provision infrastructure without IT, and marketers can publish copy without developers.

Localhost development isn't going anywhere, but it will look much different in the cloud native world. At Google, I maintained open-source and local-first software – kubernetes/minikube, which runs a local Kubernetes cluster on your laptop, and skaffold, a docker-compose equivalent for Kubernetes (in addition to a few other open-source projects). Cloud APIs might actually help standardize and abstract local developer workflows. There's two conflicting forces in local-first software – the desi

This article looks at how 1000 popular Chrome extensions impact the performance of the browser.

We have developed a critical philosophy behind how we build software, and the tech stack we rely on. We call it Run Less Software.

Amy Hoy's guide to shipping side projects, books, businesses and software — basically, any product you'd like to launch.

You don't have to solve the majority of hard problems you encounter in either business, design, or programming. Almost all of them can be restated as an easy problem, if you dare question the assumptions, reweigh the trade-offs, and stop diving after sunk cost. Above all the other principles at 37signals, this is our key to keeping the...

Developers are systems thinkers and yet, most measures of developer productivity are metrics-based, instead of systems-based. In this post, Sourcegraph co-founder and CTO Beyang Liu presents five charts that visualize what really matters for developer productivity.