Five plus One Horsemen
Warren Zevon has this beautiful song called “Keep Me In Your Heart.” Whenever I hear the opening lyrics, they make me stop from whatever I’m doing and mellow into a [...]
The bare necessities (one of those dreams)
When I’ll be in my forties, a period when I’ll be settled financially-wise, I want to open a small business. A shop named “the bare necessities.” Briefly, a 40-square meters [...]
Come on up to Trento
Come on up to Trento and gaze unto the city from within: clumsiness, pristine clumsiness, you’ll see. That’s the beauty of it; reminds me of home. Leave yourself at the [...]
Gliding through languages
There is a certain skill which is common to most engineers, regardless of their exact occupation: the ability to change their environment, tools, conditions, and still be able to do [...]
Introducing Incremental Consistency Guarantees
This post gives an informal sneak peek at Incremental Consistency Guarantees (ICG). This represents our work on improving the way applications interact with replicated storage systems, which we’ll be presenting at [...]
From Evernote to git
Evernote recently changed their policy to restrict the number of devices they support for basic users; a basic user is somebody who is not paying. Simply put, if you’re not [...]
A Brief Ramble: What Does Bitcoin Promise?
Last week I was at a Bitcoin meetup. I was initially reluctant to go, thinking that it will be a dry reunion of techies and anarchists. I could not have [...]
About Futures
It seems to me that futures are gaining a firm foothold in various trending languages. Futures, sometimes called promises, also known as deferreds, are a control abstraction in programming languages. Originally [...]
A Fistful of Ideas
Over the past few months now, I’ve been wading through a sea of papers on distributed systems. I started work on my own project, so I’m currently doing a broad exploration of the [...]
Starting from the top
In computing, abstractions are a powerful technique that helps us compose highly complicated systems and assemble them in ever-more complicated (super-)systems. Actually, abstractions have many more virtues than that, but [...]