Bytepawn

Scalable Web Architectures and Application State - 2009/06/17
In this article we follow a hypothetical programmer, Damian, on his quest to make his web application scalable.
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Thoughts on Yahoo's PNUTS distributed database - 2009/02/15
I've updated the Readings in Distributed Databases with Yahoo's new PNUTS paper.
PNUTS is Yahoo's in-house distributed tablestore used for serving some of its web properties. The goal in this post is finding out the basics: how replication is managed, what kind of guarantees the system makes, can branching occur...
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My Startup Manifesto - 2009/01/25
This is my startup manifesto.
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CIDR 2009 Proceedings - 2009/01/08
I could not attend this year's meeting, so I was waiting for the proceedings. Here it is:
http://www-db.cs.wisc.edu/cidr/cidr2009/program.html
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Introducing PrimoBlog - 2009/01/08
In an effort to get rid of compromisable targets on my server, I decided to roll my own "blog engine": PrimoBlog. As the name implies, it's quite primitive. It consists of 123 lines of shell code plus the framing HTML and CSS code. It generates static HTML and RSS from text files, so no PHP or Mysql is involved.
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Shackleton's Job Advertisement - 2009/01/08
Ernest Shackleton's 1907 ad in London's Times, recruiting a crew to sail with him on his exploration of the South Pole:

Wanted. Men for hazardous journey.
Low wages. Bitter cold.
Long hours of complete darkness.
Safe return doubtful.
Honor and recognition in the event of success.

Would this kind of ad work on programmers?
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Re: Readings in Distributed Systems - 2008/12/06
I've updated the Readings in Distributed Systems page with a few papers: 2 on implementation issues and one on Sinfonia.
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Readings in Distributed Systems - 2008/10/28
I started maintaining a list of papers on Distributed Systems.
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Entry to Photography - 2008/10/14
I've wanted to pick up photography as a hobby for years, and now that it's off-season, I finally had a chance to go out and just do it. First of all I watched BBC's Genius of Photography --- it's the perfect way to find inspiration and see for yourself that cameras don't take good pictures, photographers take good pictures.
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Doing an Ironman - 2008/09/22
Why write about the Ironman here, a blog meant for programmers and other technical types? From personal experience I know that people have a misconception about the Ironman. They think it's about swimming, biking and running training followed by a grueling day of racing followed by some bragging, per the Ironman slogan:
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Show Me Your Data Structure... - 2008/09/10
There's an old programming proverb which goes something like this:

Show me you algorithm,
and I will remain puzzled,
but show me your data structure,
and I will be enlightened.
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Transactions in Memory - 2008/09/01
I recently re-read Chapter 24 of Beautiful Code, titled Beautiful Concurrency (PDF). It's very well written, you won't regret reading it. In it, Simon Peyton Jones makes the case for Software Transactional Memory vs. explicit locking by the programmer.
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Ironman - 2008/08/25
I've been busy this weekend finishing up my first Ironman (3.8km swim, 180km bike, 42km run) season.
Pictures from the race.
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P2P vs. the Cloud - 2008/08/16
Marco Kotrotsos in a recent article claims that the cloud has failed, and instead advocates a P2P cloud architecture:

I am referring to the slew of outages the last day’s and weeks of some high profile infrastructures like Amazon S3 and Google. I always thought Googles infrastructure was untouchable. But it seemed that I had woken up to a different world last week. When I saw tweets and messages going around with "Gmail is down".
...
P2P Cloud computing in general will be the future of infrastructure.
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Data-based Recommendations - 2008/08/04
Social recommendation sites like Slashdot, Digg or the smaller Hacker News are used by millions to find interesting content on the web. Some are supposed to be worth a lot of dollars. Although these sites are useful in the sense of being better than nothing, the signal to noise ratio is still very low. Hacker News' feed features roughly 75 posts a day of which maybe 5-10% are interesting to me. In the long run, scanning through 75 posts a day to find 8 mildly interesting ones is not very good. Granted, for discovering "breaking news" social recommendation sites are ideal --- but in reality, most posted links are not new, they're just supposed to be interesting.
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Beautiful Migration - 2008/07/28

O'Reilly's Beautiful Code is an excellent book with 33 short, bite-sized chapters about interesting code. After I read the book I thought it'd be a good retrospective exercise to write your own Chapter 34 to share insights with other programmers. So here it goes:
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Book Recommendation: C Interfaces and Implementations - 2008/07/21
by David R. Hanson 544 pages, Addison-Wesley Professional Amazon homepage - Official homepage

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Bloatware is a Business Opportunity (Part II) - 2008/07/15
Read Part I first.
Given bloatware, what is the end-user to do?
Ben Kenobi would tell you to use an elegant weapon from a more civilized time.
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Bloatware is a Business Opportunity (Part I) - 2008/07/15
Bloatware is defined by Wikipedia as:

Software bloat, also known as bloatware or elephantware, is a term used in both a neutral and disparaging sense, to describe the tendency of newer computer programs to be larger, or to use larger amounts of system resources (mass storage space, processing power or memory) than necessary for the same or similar benefits from older versions to its users. Additionally, the term bloatware is used in common language for pre-installed, huge software bundles, mostly consisting of demos and trial ware.
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The Hollywood Model in Software Engineering - 2008/07/14
One of the downsides of working at a large corporation is low work efficiency and inter-project idle-times. From my own experience, I estimate that the corporate programmer could be 2x - 3x more productive, in other words, he is performing at 33% - 50% capacity. The interesting question is, is there another way? I've always known how Hollywood movies are produced, but I've never made the connection to software project management pointed out by Sue Bushell in her piece entitled Replicating the Hollywood Model.
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