Joined December 2008
- Tweets 1,505
- Following 171
- Followers 351
- Likes 392
35 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
18 Nov 2022
Firing this into the void in-case said void starts to crumble away:
I don’t know if it’s #TheNextBigThing and I don’t care much, but so far Mastodon has proved to be a pretty great life raft.
@hugofirth@hachyderm.io
19 Nov 2022
For people who are denying the technical challenges facing Twitter: the signs are already there. E.g. I’m still seeing a timeline, but it’s missing tweets from people I follow from the past several hours. Instead it seems to be cycling through follower likes and suggested topics
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19 Nov 2022
Notifications (of likes etc) also seem seriously delayed. If you have a large-ish following then perhaps the signal to noise ratio was previously such that you’ve not yet noticed. But trust me, in a DC somewhere some Message Queue servers are screaming, and it’s getting worse…
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4 Nov 2022
The terrible irony of an narcissistic clown with a god complex and $44B who buys Twitter "for freedom of speech", lays off a large % of its workforce then removes their tweets about being laid off because they "violate Twitters content policies"
2 Oct 2022
Reflecting recently on how brilliant The Morning Paper (blog.acolyer.org/) is/was at making CS research accessible and it occurred to me:
Why don't journals/conferences ask for longer abstracts in that kind of format alongside full-length submissions?
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9 Sep 2022
If you're one of those open source advocates who criticises a project's for changing license after version x but you *also* argue that maintainer's don't owe users anything/should be able to abandon projects at will: how do you reconcile those positions? Genuinely curious
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3 May 2022
Random thought: RAID-5,6 etc... are examples of read/write quorum systems. Useful? Maybe not. Neat though.
22 Apr 2022
Having spent the last two days pouring over Java Flight Recordings (❤️) I’m reminded that, for complex projects with long lifetimes, you pick a Boring ™️ language with top notch tooling. Every time
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9 Apr 2022
Most databases do way too much work to support ad-hoc, unparameterised queries. Applications typically know their workload (of maybe 9 queries) well in advance, and never change them.
We're cancelling each other over database takes today. Post your cancellable database take.
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Hugo Firth retweeted
23 Feb 2022
Thinking of submitting an RFC to add emojis to HTTP status codes...
🤞 1xx
👍 2xx
👉 3xx
👎 4xx
🖕 5xx
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19 Jan 2022
Whenever I start to think "I know a lot about this programming lark" I simply need to do anything related to TLS/SSL. Never fails to humble, frustrate and terrify in equal measure
13 Jan 2022
I'm re-reading the Physalia paper (usenix.org/conference/nsdi20…) before presenting it to a team at $work. Its amazing how much that paper either aligns with or influences my thinking on building modern highly available systems. Thank you @MarcJBrooker et al!
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13 Jan 2022
Highlights:
1. Larger consensus groups have more predictable perf under grey failures
2. Availability is useless metric without context. Who are you available for? Quorums should be close to clients
3. Many HA issues come from correlated failures like load and poison pills
Hugo Firth retweeted
31 Aug 2021
I've compiled a selection of materials on transactional and non-transactional consistency models: github.com/jackwaudby/awesom… Please submit a PR if you think i've missed any killer resources!
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Hugo Firth retweeted
27 Aug 2021
New blog post, on why caches may be bad in distributed systems, despite them being a "best practice": brooker.co.za/blog/2021/08/2…
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Hugo Firth retweeted
12 Aug 2021
🎉 It's finally ready! I've been hacking on something for the past couple months and it's absurdly great. It's time for more powerful web apps.
Announcing "A future for SQL on the web": jlongster.com/future-sql-web
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18 Jun 2021
For those who’ve heard me yammering on about graph databases but have never actually used one, you can now get a *free* managed database through Neo4j Aura (neo4j.com/cloud/aura/pricing…)
No excuse not to give it a try any more!
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6 Jun 2021
Strongly recommend dist. systems friends read “Metastable Failures in Distributed Systems” from the latest HotOS (sigops.org/s/conferences/hot…). Though some of the failures highlighted are intuitive, the generic framework and suggested fixes really got me thinking.
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20 Apr 2021
Major kudos to whoever @AzureCosmosDB is responsible for this docs page (docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azu…) describing distributed consistency levels. The music notes animation provides a wonderful intuition for a complex topic
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