February 28, 2021

Workflow Orchestration 1 - What is a workflow?

Introduction

It is hard to describe what a Workflow Platform is. It is both familiar and exotic. There are aspects of the problem space we all know well: Retries, eventual consistency, message processing semantics, visibility, heartbeating, and distributed processing to name a few. Yet, when they’re all put together in a pretty package with a bow tied on top, it becomes something almost magical. It feels like seeing the iPhone for the first time: Of course you want a touch screen on a cellphone and mobile internet access. Similarly, a workflow platform feels like the only natural way to solve problems. Once you learn it, anything else feels as clunky as using a feature phone.

February 22, 2021

Posts Of The Week 2021-02-18

The Peseverance rover lands on Mars. In this month, the UAE, PRC, and US all sent scientific instruments to Mars.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/science/nasa-peseverance-mars-landing.html

January 31, 2021

Posts Of The Week 2021-01-29

TextRank identifies connections between various entities in a text, and implements the concept of recommendation. A text unit recommends other related text units, and the strength of the recommendation is recursively computed based on the importance of the units making the recommendation. In the process of identifying important sentences in a text, a sentence recommends another sentence that addresses similar concepts as being useful for the overall understanding of the text

January 22, 2021

Posts Of The Week 2021-01-22

This blog is such a great example of why it is difficult to creat great software. So often you have to make impossible choices between security and backward-compatibility.

Today’s Go security release fixes an issue involving PATH lookups in untrusted directories that can lead to remote execution during the go get command. We expect people to have questions about what exactly this means and whether they might have issues in their own programs. This post details the bug, the fixes we have applied, how to decide whether your own programs are vulnerable to similar problems, and what you can do if they are.

January 6, 2021

Posts Of The Week 2021-01-08

Sascha Chua is a great resource on Emacs-y things

https://sachachua.com/blog/

January 5, 2021

Posts Of The Week 2020-12-31

Maybe Emacs doesn’t need to be a fusion reactor. I only hope it continues to generate energy for many years to come.
It just needs volunteers to keep the fire going.

https://www.murilopereira.com/how-to-open-a-file-in-emacs/

December 22, 2020

Posts Of The Week 2020-12-18

Replicating a database can make our applications faster and increase our tolerance to failures, but there are a lot of different options available and each one comes with a price tag. It’s hard to make the right choice if we do not understand how the tools we are using work, and what are the guarantees they provide (or, more importantly, do not provide), and that’s what I want to explore here.

December 13, 2020

Posts Of The Week 2020-12-11

Concept: Poison pill

One strategy is a poison pill: a special message on the queue that signals the consumer of that message to end its work. To shut down the squarer, since its input messages are merely integers, we would have to choose a magic poison integer (everyone knows the square of 0 is 0 right? no one will need to ask for the square of 0…) or use null (don’t use null). Instead, we might change the type of elements on the requests queue to an ADT…

November 24, 2020

Posts Of The Week 2020-11-27

Meet GPT-3. It Has Learned to Code (and Blog and Argue).

For many artificial intelligence researchers, it is an unexpected step toward machines that can understand the vagaries of human language — and perhaps even tackle other human skills.

November 24, 2020

Posts Of The Week 2020-11-24

From Monolith to Microservices

tldr;
baby steps (lots of them)
similar infrastructure to TeleSign – on prem
similar infrastructure to TeleSign? Also run on multiple clouds
started with Docker on prem
started with ugly hacks, as ones does ;)
(not related?) practices blue/green deployment
dedicated infrastructure resources
service discovery, then routing, the orchestration
community as a big reason on technology selection
involved changes to how config and secrets are made available
took much too longer to get existing tooling to work with k8s
SECURITY IS HARD, e.g., networking, scanning, security patches
Come on JVM isn’t that bad ;)
Development environment IS HARD; Figure out how to do dev with a “minimal” set of systems. Do as you like. Share instances in the cloud when possible. Make it easy to spin up a cluster in the cloud for each developer
Data migration off the the monolith database is painful. Double writing is a thing. No database may be used by one codebase.

What Makes Sand Soft?