Archive for the ‘software’ Category
On Systems Software
A prospective new college hire recently related an odd comment from his professor: systems programming is dead. I was nonplussed; what could the professor have meant? Systems is clearly very much alive. Interesting and important projects march under the banner of systems. But as I tried to construct a less emotional rebuttal, I realized I [...]
The Holistic Engineer
The idea of the holistic engineer embodies the point of view that an engineer needs to consider the whole system, the whole body of work that makes a product successful. It bears no relation to holistic health — and it’s not some even newer age quackery. There are many specialist roles in the software industry — [...]
On RAID-6 recovery
RAID algorithms have become a particular fascination of mine, and I recently read a very interesting paper that describes an optimization for RAID reconstruction (by Xiang, Xu, Lui, Chang, Pan, and Li). Before writing double- and triple-parity RAID algorithms for ZFS, I spent a fair bit of time researching the subject and have stayed interested [...]
In: EVENODD, flash, RAID, RAID-6, RDP, software, ZFS
Engineers and customers
Today I took the train out to Long Island to meet up with our New York sales team for a visit with a prospective customer. You never know with an initial meeting, but this one was great. I thought I’d share a bit about what made these guys so excited which is the same stuff [...]
Delphix Next
It’s rare to get software right the first time. I’m not referring to bugs in implementation requiring narrow fixes, but rather places in a design that simply missed the mark. Even if getting it absolutely right the first time were possible, it would be prohibitively expensive (and time-consuming) so we make the best decisions we [...]
