Software Development
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The Universal Scalability Law: Why Some Systems Get Slower, Not Just Flatter
Neil Gunther’s Universal Scalability Law adds a second penalty term to Amdahl’s Law, and that one term explains a failure…
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Consistent Hashing: The 1997 Paper Quietly Running the Internet
Dynamo, Cassandra, and every major CDN route requests through an idea from a 1997 theory paper. Almost nobody using it…
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OCaml Quietly Running the World’s Financial Infrastructure
How Jane Street’s bet on a niche functional language turned into a 30-million-line dependency, and what it teaches us about…
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The Bytecode Verifier’s Hidden Contract
Every class file passes a formal dataflow analysis before the JIT ever sees it, and that quiet checkpoint is what…
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Delta-State CRDTs: Solving the Bandwidth Problem Coordination-Free Replication Creates
CRDTs let replicas merge concurrent edits without coordination. The catch is what it costs to keep them talking to each…
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The Halting Problem’s Quiet Relevance to Static Analysis Tools
Why your linter can never be complete, and why that is not a bug in the tool but a theorem…
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The Byzantine Generals Problem and Why Most Systems Don’t Need Byzantine Fault Tolerance
Crash faults and Byzantine faults are not the same problem, and reaching for blockchain-grade guarantees inside a trusted internal network…
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The CALM Theorem: When Distributed Consistency Doesn’t Need Coordination
The theory behind why some distributed computations are safely coordination-free, and how to spot which ones are. Every distributed systems…
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Swift’s Ownership And Noncopyable Types
For nearly a decade, Swift’s relationship to memory looked settled. Classes were reference-counted automatically, structs and enums were copied freely,…
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