10 years later, any details I could offer would be relatively suspect; my memory is pretty poor. Still, I'll make an attempt. Don't write a book based on anything below.
I can honestly say it's the best job I ever had, working with the smartest collection of people (I've been fortunate to work at multiple startups, and while Ian Murdock put together a solid crew at Progeny, Basho was just chock full of brilliant people).
Riak was designed for rock solid, massive scale data. The problem was that most companies didn't really need that, and by the time someone reached that size, they had a significant investment in databases that were much more developer-friendly.
We attempted to make it easier to work with by introducing CRDTs, so developers wouldn't necessarily have to write as much application logic to handle conflicts.
Still, it's hard to sell a database when you can't demonstrate simple queries, because your choices were primarily "update static views as you add new data so you don't actually have to run queries in real-time" or "write map-reduce logic in Erlang".
And, it was hard to simulate massive scale databases, so while our resilience and operations stories were pretty good, it was challenging to anticipate how, and where, performance might start breaking down.
I miss it dearly, but I was also lucky enough to never be on a support call when someone was trying to rescue a failing cluster that served millions of customers.
I will say that Erlang made that last scenario much more manageable: the ability to connect to a live node and see exactly what was happening, and the ability to hot patch a function on the fly, was incredibly helpful.
Loved the node up podcast, especially the episode on databases. He was always a great presence on there. Played a big roll in getting me back into hobby programming after I finished my undergrad
Hahaha I thought of this immediately when I saw the article title. I fell asleep on the train a few times and ended up in Ome or Okutama when I was living in Tokyo after a long night out. Ironically Okutama was/is still one of the most beautiful areas I have ever been, did a ton of drives out to that area to go explore the mountains
I thought this was an incredible well executed/engineered art/commentary on using an incredible amount of technology to create a similar....likely sub par experience to getting a deck of cards for <10 dollars
Godot is an amazing project and when learning it from an excellent Udemy course (below if interested) I was shocked at how often I was impressed with the design/consistency and vertical integration of the development experience.
Truly an amazing artifact of the open source world. Looking forward to seeing continued adoption, the third party plugin landscape is getting interesting and I think there will be a lot of exciting development closing the gap between unreal/unity for 3d games. https://www.udemy.com/course/create-a-complete-2d-arena-surv...
I remember this being an incredible book when I read it back on my moto droid phone in 2009ish on Kindle app...time to listen to it on audible. The biggest thing I remember is it invoked some deep thoughts from me on what is conscious and whether transferring consciousness to another medium would still the same person. Seemed (and still seems) to me that continuity would be broken...but isn't that true when we go to sleep and wake up? I loved this book because it provoked a lot of questions like this. Been meaning to revisit it for years.
I’m not going to replicate all that in this comment box. However, as far as sleep is concerned: No, your brain doesn’t shut off during sleep. Everything keeps running except for some interconnects, mostly it’s a mode switch.
The same isn’t true for concussions, and concussions usually come with short term memory loss. One might imagine that’s because you lose information that only exists as ongoing electrical patterns.
Yes, this. It's hard to express how disconcerting this is to someone who hasn't experienced a concussion or neurological fainting spell.
I passed out one night alone after an undiagnosed neurological condition resulted in what was, as best we can tell, a seizure. Hit the floor and stayed there for an unknown length of time, because I didn't have a clock handy. The experience of, for want of a better term, "recohering" to find oneself awake and covered in one's own cold urine is very different from the experience of waking up. There's a distinct discontinuity of self that you don't get from waking from a dream.
I still have the distinct sensation that for some undetermined length of time, I simply wasn't there. It was a spiritually and epistemologically haunting experience.
Hahaha funny seeing you @fzakaria here, knew I recognized that name! We worked on a hypemachine scraper a long time ago 12 or 13 years ago, glad to see you are still around writing great software and interesting articles!
The knowledge of that scraper went into a Chrome extension that sees some good downloads to this day
(I guess people this use hypemachine... I have kids now so my music listening time is on a pause)
I don't think there has been a ton of iteration on it, but did you run into any specific problems or bugs or is this lack of recommendation based off caution against adopting something that is not being iterated on? Just asking because while I haven't used it in years, it's been my go-to for small projects in the past, it seemed to do what it advertised very well. I hope that someone picks up the swarm torch, I really liked the abstractions and workflow it enabled. K8s was always too heavy for me and introduced too much complexity I was uncomfortable with
While the way secrets work in Swarm seems weird when compared to Kubernetes, this is usually pretty easily solved by a quick overriding entrypoint in the docker stack file that does essentially this:
