Make something. Participate in something. Engage with someone. All of it might feel as unnatural as strapping on those running shoes after too long of a break, but once you’re back to creating, the energy comes by itself.

What happens inside the cpu? how things get delayed...

Architecture is hard sometimes--people keep offering up some new idea that quickly becomes the mainstream “way to do it” without any context or nuance, and the industry, desperate to find ways to improve their architecture, snaps it up without hesitation. Microservices was the latest in the trend, and it’s time we dissected the idea and got to the real root of what’s going on.

source: CaptainPatate

There are hackers—believe it or not—who just love the art of building software. They do it for the challenge, for the fun of it. They aren’t trying to make a million dollars.

Adoring admirers have fed Linux goodies to a disheartening state of obesity.
If only some reincarnation with the genius and sensibility of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were still guiding the evolution of Unix!

source: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Unix_philosophy

Monolith vs microservices ... small server vs big server...

We have all gotten so familiar with virtualization and abstractions between our software and the servers that run it. These days, “serverless” computing is all the rage, and even “bare metal” is a class of virtual machine. However, every piece of software runs on a server. Since we now live in a world of virtualization, most of these servers are a lot bigger and a lot cheaper than we actually think.

Writing is key to have impact in large organizations. As a senior software engineer chances are that writing is the most important skill you have to acquire in order to increase your scope beyond the team and advance your career.

This article contains some learnings that have helped the author to become better and more productive as a writer over the past 15 years.

Architecture is hard sometimes--people keep offering up some new idea that quickly becomes the mainstream “way to do it” without any context or nuance, and the industry, desperate to find ways to improve their architecture, snaps it up without hesitation. Microservices was the latest in the trend, and it’s time we dissected the idea and got to the real root of what’s going on.

Did Ken, Dennis, and Brian choose wrong with NUL-terminated text strings?

source: communications of the acm

In this article, we provide a holistic view of the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) abstractions by a systematic review of their historical evolution. We discuss some of the key factors that drove the evolution and identify the pitfalls that make them infeasible when building modern applications.

source: https://www.usenix.org

source: dragonflydigest

It’s hard to believe, looking at the modern computing world, but there is still more to life than Windows or Unix… and today, most of the alternatives run on vanilla x86 hardware and are free.

People who know what they are doing run FreeBSD! Everyone in the communication industry run FreeBSD!

source: unixsheikh

What is the even loop and how it is supposed to work?

Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value.

source: dhh

In short, the argument goes, the ability to write scheduling policies in BPF greatly lowers the difficulty of experimenting with new approaches to scheduling. Both our workloads and the systems they run on have become much more complex since the completely fair scheduler was introduced; experimentation is needed to develop scheduling algorithms that are suited to current systems. The BPF scheduling class allows that experimentation in a safe manner without even needing to reboot the test machine. BPF-written schedulers can also improve performance for niche workloads that may not be worth supporting in the mainline kernel and are much easier to deploy to a large fleet of systems.

source: https://lwn.net

source: https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2023/how_big_should_a_programming_language_be.html