Building software

Software problems tend to evolve over time into philosophy problems, a point that's come up in a few Diff pieces, like the Antithesis writeup and Asana's ontology-as-a-service ($). In this particular category, it's the philosophy of work and vocation: a bond trader, accountant, or social media manager doesn't necessarily have to spend much time... See more

Kai Krause on how short-lived software is relative to other art forms: You can hum a tune you once liked, years later. You can read words or look a painting from 300 years ago and still appreciate its truth and beauty today, as if brand new. Software, by that comparison, is more like Soufflé: enjoy it now, today, for... See more

The "Painless" data migration

1. Another challenge was to incorporate the above changes for the existing data i.e. increasing the number of shards and defining a custom routing key for each of the document. The existing index had close to 33 MN documents at the time of the change


2. Given that the routing key and the number of shards needed to changes, a

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