My new article, A Crash Course In Failure, has just been published on the architecture site NPlus1. In it, I examine the surprisingly persuasive argument that unplugging entire racks of live, production servers is not only a good idea, but that shutting them down any other way is a mistake, and what this means for [...]
Tagged architecture, error handling, failure, nplus1, system administrationJeff Atwood says:
On the other hand, I have not found in practice that programmers need to be mathematically inclined to become great software developers. Quite the opposite, in fact. This does depend heavily on what kind of code you’re writing, but the vast bulk of code that I’ve seen consists mostly of the "balancing [...]
Mike Rozlog, the product manager for the JBuilder and 3rdRail products for Embarcadero, will be speaking to the Columbus Architecture Group tonight at 6:00 p.m., on the subject of software archaeology. For more information on the topic, here is a slide deck for one of his previous presentations on the subject, and here’s a video [...]
Tagged architecture, columbus architecture group, Mike Rozlog, software archeologyHave you ever ridden a horse? When you drive the car, the process goes something like this:
Decide where you want to go.
Aim the car in that direction.
Get there.
It’s different when you ride a horse. In that case the process is more like:
Decide where you want to go.
Communicate your intention to the horse.
Arrive at some hybrid [...]
Over the years, I’ve had a number of occasions to need to store information about when somebody worked on a certain job. Sometimes people will want to store the date the work was done and the number of hours the employee worked, where as other people will need to store the start time and the [...]
Tagged data structures, Databases, metadata, time recordsHow should you unit test private methods? It depends. Some say you shouldn’t do it at all. Others say you should test everything. Who is right?
The problem that I have with a statement like, "Don’t test private methods," is that it is a circular argument. That a method is private implies that you don’t want [...]
In gardening, a hedge is a line of shrubs which forms a barrier between two areas. In finance, a hedge is a risk management strategy based on making investments or business plans in such a way that a loss in one area of the portfolio will be balanced by a gain in another area of [...]
Tagged architecture, business, hedges, open questionBack in May, I wrote a post on "Let It Crash" programming in Erlang, based on Joe Armstrong’s paper on the history of the language, and intended to return to other interesting discussions from the paper in a future post. Well, better late than never.
Today I’d like to discuss the "success" of Erlang, how it [...]
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From News of the Weird:
Facing a state budget crisis in July, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger fired about 10,000 temporary and part-time workers and ordered the 200,000 permanent employees to be paid only the minimum wage of $6.55 an hour until the legislature passed a crisis-solving budget. However, a week later the State Controller John Chiang [...]
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