Wednesday Randoms: 2015-09-30
Data
Building DistributedLog: Twitter’s high-performance replicated log service
How Twitter build a distributed log on top of Apache BookKeeper. Great post on the features they required and the results.
In this section we describe DistributedLog, a serving layer that we built on top of BookKeeper to provide an end-to-end log service satisfying the requirements above.
ScyllaDB: world’s fastest NoSQL column store database
New beta database that claims to be drop in replacement for cassandra, but way faster. We’ll see. They don’t expect to be production ready until at least January 2016.
Fully compatible with Apache Cassandra at 10x the throughput and jaw dropping low latency.
Kudu - Fast analytics on fast data
Cloudera releases a new addition to the Hadoop ecosystem. Uses raft if you need a buzz word to be interested.
Kudu provides a combination of fast inserts/updates and efficient columnar scans to enable multiple real-time analytic workloads across a single storage layer.
Product
Lost your vision
Another great post by Kyle, this time on “small gradual improvements” to existing features over new, big ideas.
Unfortunately, this is tunnel vision and serves only to blind you from seeing the most lucrative territory: small gradual improvements to existing features and cranking out good-enough ideas. Also known as boring work.
Natural Disasters
The really big one
This article makes me worried for all my friends in SF, Portland and Seattle.
It will look like the whole ocean, elevated, overtaking land. Nor will it be made only of water—not once it reaches the shore. It will be a five-story deluge of pickup trucks and doorframes and cinder blocks and fishing boats and utility poles and everything else that once constituted the coastal towns of the Pacific Northwest.
Health
Reducing workplace burnout: the relative benefits of cardiovascular and resistance exercise
I’ve been far more active the past year or two of my life and I can confirm this. The more active I am the happier and more productive I am.
After four weeks of exercise participants had greater positive well-being and personal accomplishment, and concomitantly less psychological distress, perceived stress, and emotional exhaustion.
An interactive self-care guide
Kind of neat interactive guide to figuring out why you don’t feel good. Guides you through food, medicine, fluids, sleep and more.
Have you eaten in the last four hours? Have you taken any medication you need to take? Can you take a guess at how many hours you’ve slept out of the last 24?
Decks
Are we favoring harvest or yield? Are we resilient to our dependencies? Have we provided enough control to operators? Would I want to be on call for this?
The experience of the last 40 years suggests that in general, a few good primitives should be leveraged to the hilt to deal with complexity. PostgreSQL’s UPSERT feature is built to be such a primitive…
How to bring the best in people at their worst.