Separate Concerns

Yet another Quora answer, this time to with this question which I answered on August 24, 2016: Why is Transparency a major issue in distributed databases?

Continuing my Quora answers series with this question which I answered on June 26, 2012: How would you explain the concept of a “class” in Python to a 10 year old?

From 2011 to 2014, I used to post answers on Quora.

If you’re like me, you don’t want to depend on your phone to log into a website, and you wish your favorite password manager would support 2FA.

A few days ago I read this article which made me want to list some of the tools used at the four startups I have worked at so far.

You know how some discussions can make you pause and introspect for a while after they happen?

In projects that use SQLAlchemy and Alembic via Flask-Migrate, you may want to truncate the migrations history.

April 2020 update This article is out of date.

In my last post I told you I had plans that I was not ready to talk about yet.

You may have heard it already: five years after I joined Lima, the company is shutting down.

This is just a short post to share what I now consider, after 10 years in the industry (and almost twice as many writing code), my core software architecture principles.

If you are like me, maybe you have recently updated your Linux laptop and found out that right click had stopped working on the touchpad.

Today marks the fourth birthday of my joining Lima, and it is a good occasion to talk a bit about some of the things I have been doing there.

A few weeks ago I was debugging network code, and I needed to check if some sockets were bound with SO_REUSEADDR and/or SO_REUSEPORT.

This post is a rough transcription of a lightning talk I gave at dotScale 2017.

In November 2013, I gave a talk about the Lua Ecosystem at Lua Workshop, in which I mentioned that finding the best module for some job could be hard and introduced a website I had built to solve that problem.

On Call Alice Goldfuss started a debate about having developers on call.

Thoughts I have not found the motivation to write here for a while, so I will be trying something new.

At Lima, we use the LMDB database extensively, and we looked into its source code in order to debug a few issues we had.

It is that time of the year where my RSS feed fills with book recommendations, so I decided I would try my hand at the exercise this year and write a short paragraph about five books I read in 2015 that left me with a good impression.

French politician Axelle Lemaire tweeted today that, like half of French voters, she was in favor of electronic voting.

Even among software people, those of us who work with distributed systems and algorithms are sometimes seen as mad scientists.

Clarification: The title is exaggerated.

Travis is a Continuous Integration service which is free for Open Source projects and has very good GitHub integration.

It is not a secret that I don’t like Web technology.

Two people I respect a lot, Avdi Grimm and Michel Martens, are having an interesting debate about the complexity of programming tools and libraries.

These days Linux systems tend to open graphical password prompts when a CLI application needs user authentication.

Several people have asked me what I think about microservices.

Iris is a “decentralized Cloud messaging” middleware that I have really started looking into with the recent release of version 0.3.0.

Note: I posted what follows as a Gist over a year ago.

I have just watched a small TEDx talk by Simon Peyton Jones (of Haskell fame) on CS education.

I have long been thinking that there is something wrong with modern product design thinking.

Writing a Lisp I like to learn new tools and concepts by experimenting with small projects whose sole purpose is to help me grasp something better.

I have finally decided to configure Sublime Text 2 to have it autocomplete Lua code the way I want it to.

Last weekend I attended FOSDEM, the largest Open Source conference in Europe that takes place every year in Brussels.

Hisham just published an article about his personal guidelines for writing Lua modules.

Thanks to my new job I will have the opportunity to write a lot more C than in the last three years.

Goodbye Moodstocks Friday 20th will be my last day at Moodstocks.

I use different programming languages for different tasks, but the one I prefer is Lua.

Some of the code I write is Open Source, but these days most of it is closed source and property of Moodstocks, the startup I work for.

Recently I found a rare, ugly bug in a piece of software that had been in production at Moodstocks for 6 months.

I found a talk by Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon who is a role model of mine, on 21st century application architectures.

The State Machine Let us consider a system that can take a finite number of states S[1] to S[n] over time.

Algorithms & Data Structures For a long time I have thought that there were only two fundamental parts to Computer Science: Algorithms and Data Structures.

What is SOA?

I have not had a blog for over two years.

I used to enjoy predicting how computing technology would evolve; it was like a game for me, and I was not too bad at it.

Tout le monde parle de neutralité du Net en ce moment.

Ceux qui me connaissent savent que râler, je sais faire.

J’avais promis que j’en parlerais : comme tout le monde (ou pas), j’ai regardé les vidéos diffusées par Google sur Chrome OS et je me suis fait ma petite idée.