My thoughts after reading Why Buddhism is True. If you are anything like me, you probably prefer taking the red pill to living a blindly blissful life. …

A recap at the end of 2022. Storage Systems [Paper Notes] The Google File System (GFS) The predecessor of Colossus and archetype of HDFS.devinz1993.medium.com [Paper Notes] Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data A classical distributed NoSQL data system design.devinz1993.medium.com [Paper Notes] Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store Eventual consistency in practice.devinz1993.medium.com

What came to me in the past three years (2020–2022). The unexamined life is not worth living. — Socrates Past Stories on Life In Pursuit of Rationality devinz1993.medium.com Debunking the Myth of Free Will My thoughts after reading Why Buddhism is True.devinz1993.medium.com Past Stories on Career What I Learned as a Software Engineer devinz1993.medium.com Is Every Tech Company Doomed to Slow Down? Heed the trap of local optimums in your organization.devinz1993.medium.com

My takeaways from a Coursera course. Defects in design are called flaws. Defects in implementation are called bugs. Vulnerabilities may harm confidentiality, integrity, and availability. We open ourselves up to vulnerabilities whenever the boundary between code and data blurs. Buffer overflows violate spatial safety. …

A layman’s peek into how finance works. Financial analysis is about valuation and management of financial assets. An asset is a sequence of cash flows in future. One entity’s liability is another’s asset. Hedging is the practice of bringing together assets with low covariance in return to reduce the variance…

“Embarrassingly simple but amazingly powerful ideas.” The following content is my takeaways from Bartosz Milewski’s book Category Theory for Programmers¹ and some of his video lectures². Thus far, I’ve only spent a week or so on this book — or rather, on this field of mathematics; and I only got…

A refresher on multithreading in modern C++. This is a list of my takeaways from the book C++ Concurrency in Action: Practical Multithreading (2nd edition)¹. I skipped the chapter on lock-free data structures because I suppose those could rarely find applications in everyday work. C++ Concurrency in Action: Practical Multithreading www.amazon.com Managing Threads Ensure you call either join() or…

Understanding software complexity from two books. This post is composed of my notes on software complexity from the following two books that I read before. A Philosophy of Software Design, 2nd Edition www.amazon.com Principles of Computer System Design: An Introduction www.amazon.com A Philosophy of Software Design¹ Definition of complexity: - It is related to the structure of a software system. - It makes the system hard to understand and modify.

Eventual consistency in practice. Amazon uses a highly decentralized, loosely coupled, service oriented architecture consisting of hundreds of services. At Amazon, SLAs are expressed and measured at the 99.9th percentile of the distribution, because: - An SLA stated in terms of mean or median response times fails to address performance issues…