cityhash64

Percentiles (50th, 99th, 99.9th, 99.99th) are more accurate and informative than averages in the vast majority of distributed systems. Using a mean assumes that the metric under evaluation follows a bell curve but, in practice, this describes very few metrics an engineer cares about. “Average latency” is a commonly reported metric, but I’ve never o... See more

Backpressure is the signaling of failure from a serving system to the requesting system and how the requesting system handles those failures to prevent overloading itself and the serving system. Designing for backpressure means bounding resource use during times of overload and times of system failure. This is one of the basic building blocks of cr... See more

duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction

So no, I’m not required to be able to lift objects weighing up to fifty pounds. I traded that for the opportunity to trim Satan’s pubic hair while he dines out of my open skull so a few bits of the internet will continue to work for a few more days.

Let me offer another generalization: any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it

It's now become unavoidably clear to me that I've been doing each of these things poorly. The job, the making, the pleasing, and, yeah, the being at home. And I can't live with that for another day. So, I've chosen which one has to go. At least in the way it's worked to date. Which is to say not working.

big secret to happiness is just liking stuff. finding more stuff to like. finding ways to like stuff you didn’t before. recognizing what it feels like to like something and doubling down on that. what feels frivolous is actually the whole ballgame

All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.

The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copyi... See more