Professor Beekums

DECEMBER 1, 2019

I find behavioral economics fascinating. Many economists assume rational behavior among all people and it results in economic models that seem good in theory, but end up being completely inaccurate. Humans aren’t 100% rational and the real decisions we make are difficult to account for. We have a similar problem when it comes to the software development process.

Software 61

Software Software Development Design 61

The Morning Paper

DECEMBER 1, 2019

Efficient lock-free durable sets Zuriel et al., OOPSLA’19. Given non-volatile memory (NVRAM), the naive hope for persistence is that it would be a no-op: what happens in memory, stays in memory. Unfortunately, a very similar set of issues to those concerned with flushing volatile memory to persistent disk exist here too, just at another level.

Efficiency 60

Efficiency Cache C++ Performance 60

Allen Holub

DECEMBER 1, 2019

For some reason, the notion of individual performance reviews comes up a lot. My general feeling is that we should dump them entirely. I’m actually in good company. Almost a third of U.S. companies are dropping individual reviews, including stodgy places like General Electric. (See this HBR article. There are books written on the subject,… The post Individual Performance Appraisals, Just Say No!

Performance 60

Performance 60

Brendan Gregg

DECEMBER 1, 2019

At Netflix we have 15 BPF programs running on cloud servers by default; Facebook has 40. These programs are not processes or kernel modules, and don't appear in traditional observability tools. They are a new type of software, and make a fundamental change to a 50-year old kernel model by introducing a new interface for applications to make kernel requests, alongside syscalls.

Software 52

Software Software Programming Operating System 52