Ibrahim Writes

Ibrahim Writes

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Getting Unstuck: Learnings from Restarting the Computer

My car was stuck, it wouldn't start due to some error message. AAA ended up unplugging the battery, waiting for 10 minutes, and plugging it back in. The error message disappeared, and my car started! The story is so common - but why is it that restarting the

Append Only

From wikipedia : Append-only is a property of computer data storage such that new data can be appended to the storage, but where existing data is immutable. Implementing an append-only data structure has many benefits, such as ensuring data consistency, improving performance,[6] and permitting rollbacks.[7][8] For writing, append-only

GarbageCollector.collect()

What's on your mind for Thanksgiving Ibrahim? This Thanksgiving, I did the usual excessive eating on Thanksgiving, with 2 weeks of salad. The difference this year being, I ate the salad two weeks before Thanksgiving. There was no debt to be paid, it was paid for in advance.

Read / Write Ratio

Ibrahim, why don't you write more? In distributed systems, you need to carefully optimize for reads or writes based on the expected usage of the system. Is there a lot of updates, and data coming in with only sporadic reads, or mostly stables content with lots and lots

Breakpoints

So Ibrahim, how was your weekend? Stop everything, every thread, freeze all values. When things get confusing, programmers add breakpoints in the code, hook up a debugger, and force everything to stop. Commands run one at a time. Every assumption is checked, every variable poked at. Is that boolean really

Version++

So Ibrahim, do you have anything new to offer? Our understanding of "new version" is all wrong. In general, "new version" means a better something. A better iPhone, a better Windows, Web 3.0. Even Covid has versions, B.1.617. 2 > Delta CEO calling

While hasNext(), Iterator.next()

But Ibrahim, shouldn't you only keep writing if you're good at it? Another iteration, another cycle, another loop, another day, another week, another post. Loops are magical, they transition so smoothly from an ending to a beginning. The CPU has an instruction cycle [https://en.wikipedia.

Unit Tests are the First Consumers of Any Public API

But Ibrahim, who will read what you write? * This is not the code * This is not the interface * This is not the pseudocode This is the steel thread to confirm that things are working. That we have storage, compute and network. Behind every cute/innocent looking Hello World, is a