Tomorrow I join the team at InfluxDB, something I’m really excited about. I’m really looking forward to coding in Go full-time — it’s a language with real promise, a nice clean tool chain, and a very active community.
Continue reading Measure Everything
All posts by Philip O'Toole
Is node.js just a stopgap?
Something just doesn’t feel right about node.js.
After coding in it for almost a year, it’s been fun, but I’ve decided it’s just a waypoint to somewhere better.
Come for the Features, Stay for the Uptime
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what makes computer services and products sticky — what makes users and customers come back again and again to what you’ve built. There are lots of ways to summarize it, but when it comes to systems that help technical people run their own systems, they come for the features, but they stay for the uptime.
Evolving a language in and for the real world: C++ 1991-2006
Bjarne Stroustrup has great paper on his website titled Evolving a language in and for the real world: C++ 1991-2006. It provides fascinating insights on the development of the language, the challenges involved, and discusses interesting design ideas. If you have even a basic understanding of C++, it’s a such a worthwhile read.
Continue reading Evolving a language in and for the real world: C++ 1991-2006
Replicating SQLite using Raft Consensus
SQLite is a “self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine”. However, it doesn’t come with replication built in, so if you want to store mission-critical data in it, you better back it up. The usual approach is to continually copy the SQLite file on every change.
I wanted SQLite, I wanted it distributed, and I really wanted a more elegant solution for replication. So rqlite was born.
Wow, the Go Memory Model really threw me
So far coding in Go has been fun. It comes with nice functionality that lets you know that the Go team really have been writing system software (useful stuff like this, and this). And then I read about the Go Memory Model, and had my consciousness raised.
Writing a Syslog Collector in Go
I’ve started coding in Go (golang), and I received some advice recently from Robert Griesemer, whom I was fortunate enough to sit beside at a recent Go Meetup. To learn Go, Robert suggested that I code a solution in Go for a problem I had previously solved in a different language.
Call me Definitely
The creator of the network monitoring system Riemann, Kyle Kingsbury, has put together a comprehensive series of blog posts, on the fault-tolerance, high-availability, and general correctness of number of database and storage technologies. Of the technologies discussed I am most familiar with — elasticsearch and Apache Kafka — I found the posts to be a great read.
If you haven’t read them yet, you should check them out on his site.
A Prayer for Distributed Systems Developers
Over 16 years, I’ve written software up-and-down the entire stack. Earliest in my career I wrote boot ROM software for specialized embedded devices. This kind of programming taught me so much about how computers really work.
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InfluxDB and Grafana HOWTO
This blog describes working with InfluxDB 0.8. InfluxDB 0.8 is no longer supported, and has been superseded by the 1.0 release.
I recently came across InfluxDB — it’s a time-series database built on LevelDB. It’s designed to support horizontal as well as vertical scaling and, best of all, it’s not written in Java — it’s written in Go. I was intrigued to say the least.