Mar 9Some Words About FearI want to talk about fear. I usually talk about things like page faults, cache misses, and joules. But not today. We don’t always mention fear, but I think it’s part of our shared existence. Maybe I should be more careful with language. …4 min read4 min read
Dec 12, 2022All those “this is the future” postings are crap, really.Lately there has been what I can only call a deluge of postings like “AI is the future of everything!” and really the only competition for that sheer volume is the bulk of contra-postings that say, “The current state of AI is a disaster!” But don’t worry I’m here to…Hype2 min readHype2 min read
Dec 2, 2022That Fake Steve Jobs Deathbed SpeechI saw it make the rounds again a little while ago. There’s a Snopes article on it here. I’m especially bothered by this bit of fakery because: It uses Jobs’ name to tell someone else’s agenda, an agenda that shouldn’t need fakery to be interesting by the way. It makes…2 min read2 min read
Nov 30, 2022My Problem with NFTsI’m not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. This is my personal opinion on something that bothers me and that is crypto currencies in general, and today’s special installment, NFTs. Non-fungible tokens. There is more information here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token Let’s talk about what’s interesting about NFTs. Well, first, what is…Nft5 min readNft5 min read
Nov 17, 2022Source Browsing in the 90s — Browsing Excel in 14kThis is another of my “I better write this down before I forget” articles about some old technology. …Software Development11 min readSoftware Development11 min read
Oct 13, 2022Big O-no notationLike everything else I write, the following will only be approximately correct. For the most part, software performance engineering has almost nothing to do with the big O of algorithms and in fact big O can easily lead you to poor choices. …4 min read4 min read
Jul 24, 2022“If you’re really good at software performance engineering you’re only wrong about 95% of the time”If you’re not good, it’s worse. This is one of my favorite aphorisms and I throw it in every time I teach performance engineering to people. I didn’t do an actual study to get an exact number — obviously — it’s just supposed to come off the tongue easily. …Software Performance8 min readSoftware Performance8 min read
Jul 12, 2022Hard and Soft Mode Debugging or The Woes of Soft Mode[I’m moving some my more interesting old blogs from web archive to someplace they can actually be found. Keep in mind these were written a lot time ago.] 08/22/2008 I had to explain this a little while ago and I wrote up something that I thought was generally interesting. …5 min read5 min read
Jul 12, 2022A Few Good (Performance) Men[This bit of parody is often requested so I’m reposting it] Originally posted Thursday, June 09, 2005 2:57 PM ; recovered from the Wayback Machine Sometimes people ask me why my talks tend to teach the basics about performance and not Really Scary Performance Stuff (TM). My answer is actually…Software Performance2 min readSoftware Performance2 min read
May 31, 2022Testing and InstrumentationLast week Charity Majors wrote a series of tweets about testing software. The general thesis being: you can easily hit diminishing returns in testing, and people often over-invest there are so many combinations it’s just not at all feasible to prevent all your problems with testing therefore, you should really…Software Development7 min readSoftware Development7 min read
