Presentation programs like Powerpoint are complicated and hard to use. Why? Presenting a slideshow is usually very simple: click to advance a slide. Most of the complication of the program, therefore, is focused on creating the presentation, not presenting it.
Every hotel I stay at professes a commitment to the environment. There’s always a card telling me to leave my towels on the floor if I want new linens, and hang them up to reuse them. The card urges me to reuse my towels because washing linens consumes water, detergent, and so on. But I don’t remember the last time housekeeping actually respected my wishes when I hung up my towels. Why not?
Scalability is a mathematical function that’s simple, precise, and really useful. It describes the relationship between system performance and load. In this talk you’ll learn the function (the Universal Scalability Law), how it describes and predicts system behavior you see every day, and how to use it in practice.
Why is it hard to apply DevOps principles and practices to databases, and how can we get better at it? This talk explores real-life stories that answer these two questions, through the perspectives of teams that have changed the entrenched culture, processes, and tooling—and those who’ve tried.
Google’s Go language is now very popular for systems programming. It’s efficient and fun to program in Go, and it produces high-performance programs. Go is well suited for working with SQL databases, and has excellent SQL drivers. In this talk Baron will show how to use Go’s database/sql package with databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL. He’ll discuss idiomatic database/sql code, available drivers for MySQL and PostgreSQL, and discuss tips and tricks that will save you time and frustration.
The first time I tried to monitor a database, I was overwhelmed. There were hundreds of variables to monitor, and there were lots of Nagios check scripts that had dozens of checks. I wasn’t sure what alerts I should set up, so I set up too many and got a bunch of noise as a result. A couple of years later, I returned to that company and found all those alerts still in place, still spamming everyone — but they’d just filtered every alert to the trash.
I grew up in the age of Internet Explorer versus Netscape, and frequently used lesser-known browsers like Opera, Konqueror, and Phoenix. I don’t know why, but I just didn’t want to use mainstream browsers. And for some reason, that has remained true over time. I’m currently using Brave as my default browser, but I use Firefox, Chrome, and Safari on a regular basis too.
As a founder and CTO, one of the biggest surprises I encountered was how different my working relationship became with my former technical peers. A casual opinion about a technical matter, which used to be routine, became very problematic when I acquired status due to my title. And my schedule made it even harder for my team to work with me. I struggled to communicate with them, and they with me, about things that used to be fluid and easy. But in the process I also worked with some people who seemed to navigate and help me navigate this new relationship much more easily.
Do you know what database indexes are and how they work? Do they seem hard to understand? They don’t have to be. The basic principles you need to know are simple and easy to remember.
Chaos Engineering: Building Confidence in System Behavior through Experiments. O’Reilly Media, 2017. Casey Rosenthal, Lorin Hochstein, Aaron Blohowiak, Nora Jones, and Ali Basiri.
This book should be required reading for anyone building a system complex enough to make it hard to understand the full scope of its behaviors under varying circumstances, which describes most software.
I gave this talk at a VividCortex-hosted event including customers and friends. The talk is a synopsis of part of an internal dossier I’m building at VividCortex, summarizing current trends in our industry and making some predictions about their implications. I’ve been validating my quasi-research by discussing it in-depth with our customers and with experts from a spectrum of technology industry, and used this opportunity to share what I’ve learned from those conversations.
