Virtual Buffet Line
Many people have written about the logistical challenges of food in a conference. You trade off not just, as Chris points out, expensive food versus terrible food, but also the challenges of serving the food to everyone at once.
One natural method of crowd control is the buffet line. People …
read moreDRY is a Trade-Off
DRY, or Don't Repeat Yourself is frequently touted as a principle of software development. "Copy-pasta" is the derisive term applied to a violation of it, tying together the concept of copying code and pasta as description of software development bad practices (see also spaghetti code).
It is so uniformly reviled …
read moreFifty Shades of Ver
Computers work on binary code. If statements take one path: true, or false. For computers, bright lines and clear borders make sense.
Humans are more complicated. What's an adult? When are you happy? How mature are you? Humans have fuzzy feelings with no clear delination.
I was more responsible as …
read moreUniversal Binary
I have written before about my Inbox Zero methodology. This is still what I practice, but there is a lot more that helps me.
The concept behind "Universal Binary" is that the only numbers that make sense asymptotically are zero, one, and infinity. Therefore, in order to prevent things from …
read moreThe Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever (In Python)
Hey, Back Off!
The choice in parameters for back-off configuration is important. It can be the difference between a barely noticable blip in service quality and an hours-long site outage. In order to explore the consequences of the choice, I wrote a little fictional ditty about a fictional website.
I hope you enjoy …
read moreA Labyrinth of Lies
In the 1986 movie Labyrinth, a young girl (played by Jennifer Connelly) is faced with a dilemma. The adorable Jim Henson puppets explain to her that one guard always lies, and one guard always tells the truth. She needs to figure out which door leads to the castle at the …
read moreConditionally Logging Expensive Tasks
(I have shown this technique in my mailing list. If this kind of thing seems interesting, why not subscribe?)
Imagine you want to log something that is,
potentially,
expensive to calculate.
For example,
in DEBUG mode,
you would like to count the classes of the objects in
gc.get_objects()
and …
My Little Pony -- DevOps is Magic
(This article is based on the one I originally published on OpenSource.com.)
In 2010, the My Little Pony franchise was rebooted with the animated show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. The combination of accessibility to children with the sophisticated themes the show tackled garnered a following that cut …
read moreNumbers in Python
Numbers in Python come in all shapes and forms. The reason different kind of representations of numbers exist is because they all have different trade-offs. These trade-offs are often surprising!
Integers
The most surprising things about integers is how easily they stop being
integers.
Dividing two integers, for example,
4 …