January 2017

Tech

LLVM for Grad Students

LLVM is much more useful than just for hacking on compilers and other research!
LLVM's IR (intermediate representation) is awesome because it's actually human readable (similar to RISC machine code) unlike most other compilers

Why Haskell

Socket Programming HOWTO

Just use INET (i.e. IPv4) and STREAM (i.e. TCP) sockets

Under the Hood: Building and open-sourcing RocksDB

Embeddable database: skips network overhead (potentially makes queries twice as slow)
Traditional databases don't have good locking strategies to scale well with multiple cores (making them unable to max out available storage IOPS)

The History of RocksDB

The advent of flash memory meant that network latency became a much higher cost to performance than before (0.5% impact with disk vs. 50% impact with flash)

You Might Not Need a WebSocket

Web realtime users usually want to data sync, not actually have bidirectional streams
Why not build a nicer abstraction for end use case (e.g. pub/sub, data sync) rather than falling back to a stream?

To AMQP or to XMPP, that is the question

Don't use XMPP if all you want is a message queue

Disable Your Antivirus Software (Except Microsoft's)

Antivirus software generally sucks, they can kill your product

Life

Random

P vs NP survey article

"On the Internet, it is do or do not. There is no disclaim."