Hey, it's HighScalability time:

What could this be? Swarms of drones painting 3D light sculptures against the night sky!

• Quotable Quotes:
  • Visnja Zeljeznjak: Steve Jobs' product pricing formula: cost of materials x 3 + 33%
  • Benedict Evans: We now have over 2bn iOS and Android devices on earth, and this will grow in the next few years to well over 3bn.
  • @ClearStoryData: It's true! Avg beer drinker attracts 4.4% more Mosquitos than water drinker #Strataconf
  • Leslie Lamport: The core idea of the problem of that notion of causality came about because of my familiarity with special relativity...where one event could causally effect another depended on weather or not information from one could physically reach the other.
  • @laurelatoreilly: Fascinating session about cargo ships going dark to shift market prices #IoT #strataconf "your decisions are only as good as your data"
  • @muratdemirbas: Distributed/decentralized coordination is expensive & hard to scale. Centralized coordination is cheap & scales easily using hierarchies.
  • @froidianslip: ”Kafka is awesome. We heard it cures cancer." -- @gwenshap #Strataconf
  • @timoreilly: RT @grapealope: The self-driving car has 6000 sensors, and takes readings at 4Hz. That's a lot of data. @MCSrivas #strataconf #MapR
  • @froidianslip: Love the paraphrase borrowed from Ray Bradbury, "Any sufficiently complex configuration is indistinguishable from code." #Strataconf
  • @matei_zaharia: Spark shatters MapReduce's 100 TB and 1 PB sort records... with 10x fewer nodes
  • @msallstr: “Synchronous calls in this environment are the crystal meth of programming”  @mjpt777 on the new   reactive manifesto 
  • @postwait: “If you put them under enough stress, perfectly rational people will panic and start believing in science” #priceless
  • Ilya Grigorik: It's great to see access from mobile is around 30% faster compared to last year.
  • @ryandotsmith: Recently migrated an async system to SQS. Much simple. Tiny latency. Here is the code (maybe a gem?)


• People just don't appreciate the power of messy. The problematic culture of "Worse is Better". There's an implied notion here that people can't recognize better when they see it. Better is not a platonic ideal. It can't be proved by argument. Better, like evolution, is something that works itself out in practice. Like evolution, Worse is Better is an algorithm for stepping through a possibility space by jumping from one working phenotype to the next more adapted working phenotype. And for many, that's better. Not Ideal, but Better.


• The Times They Are a-Changin'. Docker and Microsoft partner to drive adoption of distributed applications. What's the goal? nickstinemates: Package your Windows app in a docker container, use same tooling you would otherwise use to deploy to a docker engine running on a Windows host. Package your Linux app in a docker container, use same tooling you would otherwise use to deploy to a docker engine running on a Linux host.


• Leandro Pereira writes a fine autobiography in Life of a HTTP request, as seen by my toy web server. All the stages of life are there. Socket creation. Acceptance. Scheduling. Coroutines. Reading requests. Parsing requests. All the way to the reply and the death of the connection. A lot to learn if you want to look at the simplified internals of a service.


• Wonderful talk: Call Me Maybe: Carly Rae Jepsen and the Perils of Network Partitions. Kyle Kingsbury takes a detailed look at different partition problems in different databases. There are split brains. Masters dying. Lost data. General network mayhem. It's great. The lesson: what's written down in the marketing documentation is not always what you get. Test your application and see what really happens. The world is not simple. A dumb solution where you understand the failure modes can be a good choice.

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