Paul Baran (born Pesach Baran /ˈbærən/; April 29, 1926 – March 26, 2011) was a Polish-American engineer who was a pioneer in the development of computer networks. He was one of the two independent inventors of packet switching.

source: book; where wizards stay up late

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

source: queue.acm.org

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

Meaningful problems are the most valuable human motivators. Made-up problems are a blight. Ensure you have not quite enough time and people available to tackle the former lest you start inventing the latter.

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

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.

Talk from Andrew Kelley about data oriented design and how it can help to reduce memory footprint from workload with careful design.

this collection of thoughts on software development gathered by grug brain developer

grug brain developer not so smart, but grug brain developer program many long year and learn some things although mostly still confused

Lawrence Gilman Roberts (December 21, 1937 – December 26, 2018) was an American engineer...

As a program manager and later office director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency, Roberts and his team created the ARPANET using packet switching techniques invented by British computer scientist Donald Davies and American Paul Baran.

source: book; where wizards stay up late

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

Plan 9 was intended to be Unix, done better. It preemptively replaced a lot of what we now bodge together with virtual machines, containers, and even microkernels, and it did it more simply and cleanly. But it wasn’t compatible enough to replace its ancestor. With off-the-shelf existing 21st century tech, we can fix that.

source: fosdem2024

A curated list of openbsd’s innovations

There is something special in simple code. Here I’m not referring to simplicity to fight complexity or over engineering, but to simplicity per se, auto referential, without goals if not beauty, understandability and elegance.

The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it. This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change.

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.

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (/ˈlɪklaɪdər/; March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J. C. R. or “Lick”, was an American psychologist[2] and computer scientist .... He is particularly remembered for being one of the first to foresee modern-style interactive computing and its application to all manner of activities; and also as an Internet pioneer with an early vision of a worldwide computer network long before it was built

source: book; where wizards stay up late