Kevin Sookocheff

As a software system scales it becomes sufficiently large that the number of working parts, coupled with the number of working programmers making changes on it, makes the behaviour of the system extremely difficult to reason about.

The theory of distributed systems promoted the use of logical clocks by introducing the idea of causality tracking as an abstraction for reasoning about concurrency between events in the system.

HybridTime introduces a hybrid between physical and logical clocks that can be used to implement globally consistent database snapshots.

TrueTime is Google’s solution to providing to globally consistent timestamps to determine ordering of events.

Vector clocks are an extension of Lamport Clocks designed to determine all correct orderings of events in a distributed system.

Computers generally track the current time using a quartz crystal that oscillates at a known frequency.

The Network Time Protocol (NTP) is a system for synchronizing the clocks of hosts and clients across the Internet.

Still in search of a Kubernetes development environment I can run on my development machine that somewhat replicates, I was recently introduced to both the multipass and microk8s projects from Canonical. multipass is a prerequisite for microk8s, so let’s…

The ancient Greek poet Archilochus wrote that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

All healthy technology discussions should begin with business goals and use those goals as a reasonable set of guidelines to focus technology investment decisions.

In creating a development workflow for releasing HTTP+JSON APIs, many teams settle on the API description and documentation standard OpenAPI.

One of the recurring themes of any technology discussion is programming language.

Spring Data REST combines the features of Spring Data with Spring HATEOAS to make it easy to build hypermedia-driven REST APIs on top of Spring Data repositories.

Microservices have become part of the software engineering cultural zeitgeist to the extent that alternative approaches to architecture and development are treated as somehow inferior.

When building and running a system deployed as a monolith, we are able to make a certain set of assumptions about the behaviour of the overall application.

In a shopping cart, the swivel wheels of the cart are set in the front, and the fixed wheels are set in the back.

In The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond recounts the early years of Linux.

Many organizations have multiple applications that are being built independently as a microservices-based platform.

With so many people running microservice workloads, it is inevitable that organizations keep bumping into the same set of problems: state management, resiliency, event-handling, and more.

In my last post I detailed how to setup a local Kubernetes development cluster using kind.

kind is a tool built for running local Kubernetes clusters using Docker containers as nodes. kind was primarily designed for testing Kubernetes itself, but it is actually quite useful for creating a Kubernetes environment for local development, QA, or CI/…

It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door.

VoltDB is an in-memory database borne out of the H-Store research project spearheaded by Michael Stonebraker.

When working with Spring Boot, some auto-configuration can happen seemingly by magic.

Many OCaml guides and tutorials refer to the OCaml toplevel, but what exactly is this thing?

I’m a fan of Java.

Inversion of Control (IoC), also known as Dependency Injection (DI), allows an object to define their dependencies as constructor arguments (strictly speaking, you can set these dependencies as properties, but the examples I will use today are constructor…

After recently setting up a new machine and going through the exercise of setting up a development environment for the nth time, I was frustrated by having to install and configure all of my plugins and dependencies to support auto-completion, syntax high…

This post covers some of the major features of OCaml while solving Problem 1 from Project Euler.

opam — the OCaml Package Manager — is the tool for installing OCaml and any OCaml tools and libraries.

I was first introduced to ML through the Coursera Programming Languages course.

Engineering, for much of the twentieth century, was mainly about artifacts and inventions.

Before the Internet became a global network connecting millions of devices, it was a simple research experiment connecting a handful of institutions.

Leading software companies have discovered that developing capable technology is not enough to guarantee long-term success.

Complex processes may require collaboration and coordination of many components.

After graduating from university my (future) wife and I travelled and worked in Kenya as part of the Commonwealth of Learning — an intergovernmental agency dedicated to open learning and distance education.

To meet the challenges of scaling systems in size, scope, and complexity, it is useful to look at new approaches and theories to analyze, design, deploy, and manage these systems.

A queueing system can be described as the flow of items through a queue.

Python 2 will retire in about one month.

Large organizations have a lot of layers.

To deliver real-time communication (RTC) from browser to browser requires a lot of technologies that work well together: audio and video processing, application and networking APIs, and additional network protocols that for real-time streaming.

There is no one-size-fits-all cellular network used across the world, and trying to understand how cellular technology works across all the different uses cases is difficult, if not impossible, in a short blog post.

WiFi, technically specified in the IEEE 802.11 set of standards, is one of the most widely deployed wireless standards in the world.

Ethernet is a technology developed a Xerox PARC in 1973 and 1974 to support local area networking.

All wireless networks (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G, LTE, etc.) operate using radio signals.

Inspiration for software architecture often comes from the world of building architecture.

I recently had the pleasure of being part of the Tied to Machines podcast.

Software is core to the operation of our business, and as architects, we are the key conduit between business and technology.

The User Datagram Protocol (UDP), first described in 1980 by RFC 768, offers a minimal set of functionality: there is no guarantee of message delivery, no guarantee of message order, no congestion avoidance, and no tracking of connection state.

One of the many paradoxes of human creativity is that it seems to benefit from constraints.