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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
It is a good practice to start any discussion “in the middle” — to assume some preconditions, and dive directly into the topic, abstracting away everything that is non-essential. Using [...]
Misery hates company, that’s how it should be. — The force which breaks everything around us is just ourselves, moving, budging, pushing everything, while everything is just fine if you leave [...]
Computer Science, as a research and experimentation field, is atypical; has always been and will always stand out from the crowd of sciences. I should probably not dare contradict Peter Denning, [...]
I have a new favorite aphorism. I honestly don’t remember how exactly I came across it, possibly because I first heard it while I was slightly drunk. Anyway, as the title [...]