1 day agoDistributed Systems: Consensus, Elections, and Fault ToleranceGrowing into one of the largest empires in human history is an incredible achievement. The Roman Kingdom, then Republic, and then Empire gained this status through more than a thousand years of expansion, conquest, trade, and internal development. It grew from a city-state to a colossal empire stretching from Britain…Distributed Systems11 min readDistributed Systems11 min read
4 days agoDistributed Systems: Clocks, Causality, and Ordering EventsFor thousands of years, civilisations believed that the agents of spatial temporal events were either deities — far more superior than they were — , human beings, or animals. The problem of truly understanding cause and effect patterns became apparent when civilisations started building machines and implements. …Distributed Systems13 min readDistributed Systems13 min read
Mar 13Distributed Systems: A PrimerAround the late 1970s, Pele — no less than a Brazilian god and the king of football — popularised the expression “o jogo bonito”, a Portuguese phrase that translates to “the beautiful game” in English. The exact origin of the phrase is disputed but attributions have been made to Pele’s…Software Development6 min readSoftware Development6 min read
Mar 9The Cellular Concept: HandoffsConsider that you are seated in a moving vehicle or train and are on a phone call exchanging pleasantries with your significant other or mate. …Technology5 min readTechnology5 min read
Jun 13, 2022The First Bug on Mars: OS Scheduling, Priority Inversion, and the Mars Pathfinder“It’s like The Man in the High Castle for Earth’s history.” — Rebecca Boyle, The Atlantic. From its blood-like hue to its potential to sustain life, Mars has intrigued humankind since we first set eyes on this star-like object in the night sky that stands out from the other wanderers…Operating Systems12 min readOperating Systems12 min read
May 24, 2021Cryptographic Hash FunctionsCryptography is the science and technique of securing information and communications to guarantee that only those for whom the information is intended can understand and process it. Hashing is the process through which plaintext data of any length is mapped into a unique ciphertext of fixed length known as a…Cryptography12 min readCryptography12 min read
Mar 25, 2020Distributed Messaging: Bus vs Broker“Coupling is a measure of how many assumptions parties make about each other when they communicate” Service interaction is considered a first-class citizen in various industry standards. The importance of interaction increases as monolithic systems are broken down into smaller services, becoming more service-oriented, and as processes increasingly cross organizational…Software Development4 min readSoftware Development4 min read
Feb 28, 2020Concurrency is not Parallelism“Concurrency is about dealing with lots of things at once. Parallelism is about doing lots of things at once.” — Rob Pike In programming, concurrency is the composition of independently executing processes, while parallelism is the simultaneous execution of (possibly related) computations. A concurrent program has multiple logical threads of…Concurrency2 min readConcurrency2 min read
Nov 13, 2019Database Connections: Less is MoreAs far as architectural aphorisms go, Mies van der Rohe’s ‘Less is More’ seems to succinctly define a modernist ethic. What’s less well known however, is that van der Rohe wasn’t actually the originator of the phrase, even if it did come to be inextricably linked with him. …Software Development9 min readSoftware Development9 min read
Oct 7, 2019Unit Testing: Tell Your Doubles ApartHave you ever stopped to think: Why do we write tests? Most people would say that we do it to verify that code works as expected. Well, while that’s true, it’s not the whole truth. After all, expectations of correctness and accuracy can be made through manual tests. …Software Development11 min readSoftware Development11 min read
