Rob Janssen

Gallery of Processor Cache Effects

Most of my readers will understand that cache is a fast but small type of memory that stores recently accessed memory locations.  This description is reasonably accurate, but the “boring” details of how processor caches work can help a lot when trying to understand program performance.

What I’ve Learned About Giving Feedback to Peers — Life and Philosophy — Medium

Gah. So hard. I mean, giving feedback at all is hard, but when you’re a subordinate or a supervisor, there’s at least some built-in structure. It’s (relatively) easy to take advantage of that structure to communicate feedback with the appropriate amount of respect and deference.

Secrets of the Conditional (ternary) Operator

Every self-respecting C/C++ programmer knows what the ternary operator is, and most everyone used it at least once in their programs.

How to get Database Design Horribly Wrong

Database Design is one of those tasks where you have to carefully get all the major aspects right. If you mess-up just one of these, it can all go horribly wrong. So what are these aspects that can ruin database design, and how can you get them right? Robert Sheldon explains.

MongoDB 3.0 - WiredTiger Storage Engine and Updated MMS

Some time ago, when MongoDB 2.6 was released Kelly Stirman, Director of Products at MongoDB answered our questions regarding the latest release. Now with MongoDB 3.0 announced for March and MongoDB 3.

Working Effectively with Unit Tests – Interview with Jay Fields

Looking for audio only? Listen on In this interview with Jay Fields, Senior Software Engineer at DRW Trading, we discuss his approach to writing maintainable Unit Tests, described in his book ’Working Effectively with Unit Tests’.

DEVWEEK 2015

How TFS stores files and calculated deltas on versioned files

A MongoDB Story

We love MongoDB. But we recently encountered a roadblock getting it into a larger organization.

How we upgrade a live data center

A few weeks ago we upgraded a lot of the core infrastructure in our New York (okay, it’s really in New Jersey now – but don’t tell anyone) data center. We love being open with everything we do (including infrastructure), and really consider it one of the best job perks we have.

This Read-It-Later-list is just that, bookmarks of stuff I intend to read or have read. I do not necessarily agree with opinions or statements in the bookmarked articles.

This list is compiled from my Pocket list.