hello, world
One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2018 was to start blogging. Thirteen months later I’m making good on that resolution. You’ll have to forgive my tardiness.
I’m just old enough to remember when the internet was a smaller place. I learned
HTML and CSS from some guy named Dave, who ran the eponymous davesite.com,1
back when that was a cool domain name. I had a Geocities account, though I’m
sorry to say that the URL has been lost to the sands of time.2 Back in those
days, you started a blog by FTPing some PHP files to some shared webhost and
praying that your blog got popular, but not too popular, because you couldn’t
figure out how to get the webserver to disable register_globals. And those
blogs were often pure gold, better references to delightfully obscure topics
than anything money could buy.
This blog is my attempt to join this storied tradition, before that old web disappears altogether.
If the programmer “humor” hasn’t made it clear already, I write code for a living. I spent the past two years working on CockroachDB, a distributed, horizontally scalable, strongly consistent, cloud native SQL database. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, just know that CockroachDB is what everyone actually wants when they think they want “blockchain.”
I’m now on sabbatical at the Recurse Center, where I’ll be spending the next six weeks following my programming whims to sort out what I want to do next.
I expect this blog to be mostly software engineering war stories. I’ve managed to accumulate quite the collection of weird facts and crazy bugs. Every now and then I might slip up and write something off topic or personal. We’ll see.
In an effort to shrink the internet just a little bit, I want to offer a tip of the hat to some of my colleagues who blazed the blogging trail ahead of me:
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Arjun Narayan, who’s doing double duty as a contemporary technology philosopher and the unofficial historian of storage systems.
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Justin Jaffray, who wrote the only understandable definition of write skew in the known universe, and beat Leslie Lamport to actually explaining why consensus is important
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Matt Jibson who, at least once a year, becomes the world’s expert on a new topic. Mostly recently it’s been rounding floating point numbers in Go and formatting SQL statements automatically.
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Raphael ‘kena’ Poss, who has written so many wonderful articles on such a wide variety of topics I can’t even begin to describe them.
There are some other programmers, whom I don’t know personally, whose blogs I admire from afar:
I’m sure I’ve forgotten folks. I’ll update the list as the names come to me.