David Turner says…

Backpressure in a distributed system allows receiving nodes to notify sending nodes that they temporarily lack the capacity to handle further requests.

Distributed systems must always be able to correctly deal with the non-delivery (or non-acknowledgement) of a message, but in any reasonable network environment one can assume that message non-delivery is fairly rare.

Sometimes it’s useful to represent all the odd keys on a Mac OS keyboard with their proper glyphs in a textual conversation.

Bisection is a mightily effective technique for debugging those tricky issues that were quietly introduced into a codebase and not noticed for an extended period of time.

The Doomsday rule is an algorithm for working out the day of the week of a given date.

Back in August 2014 a user reported they couldn’t run Elasticsearch: it would immediately crash with a segmentation fault.

If you are suffering from more than your fair share of silent corruption then you might have a buggy storage system.

100% reliable data storage is fundamentally impossible, but we can get pretty close with layers of protection against something going wrong at the physical level.

I sometimes have a need to collect a packet capture for an extended period of time.

I recently came across a video from Zach Star which posed the question of telling the time on a clock whose two hands are identical lengths.