Rob Janssen

Intern Series: Diary of an Ad Server Intern

These days, the guys and gals on the data pipeline team find themselves in an interesting position: wrangling 20TB of billing data and records into databases and data warehouses every single day.

Some Epigrams

I am no Alan Jay Perlis, nor am I really worthy. Function parameters fornicate. If you have 7, they will quickly breed to 14. Any "new" idea which a person thinks about has a 98% chance of having been researched better and more deeply before 1980. Thus most new ideas aren't.

Why Stashboard and Pingdom Weren't Enough: The Evolution of a Status Page posted by: Marshall Jones

Roughly 3 months ago and after some unexpected downtime, our community asked us for more insight into the state of our API. We quickly pushed out an MVP using Stashboard, given our people-pleasing nature, but, quickly discovered that it didn’t give the granularity or accuracy we needed.

How we built a Super Nintendo out of a wireless keyboard @Sifteo #Sifteo

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from M. Elizabeth Scott an engineer at Sifteo! In today’s world, video game consoles have become increasingly complex virtual worlds unto themselves. Shiny, high polygon count, immersive, but ultimately indirect.

Exploit Information Leaks in Random Numbers from Python, Ruby and PHP

The Mersenne Twister (MT 19937) is a pseudorandom number generator, used by Python and many other languages like Ruby, and PHP. It is known to pass many statistical randomness tests, but it’s also known to be not cryptographically secure.

The Largest Black Holes in the Universe

Meet the new record-holder for the LARGEST BLACK HOLE IN THE UNIVERSE (so far) in this EXPANDED and UPDATED version (in 1080p) of our most popular Cosmic Jou...

Here's what ICT should really teach kids: how to do regular expressions

"Technical literacy" is the subject of an ongoing, worldwide educational debate. Some argue that every kid should learn the basics of programming and successfully write a program or two before graduating – just as we expect every student to write an essay or two before leaving school.

OpenReplica

What is OpenReplica? OpenReplica is an object replication service for providing reliability and fault-tolerance in distributed systems. It is designed to maintain long-lived, critical state (such as configuration information) and to synchronize distributed components.

mnot’s blog

One of the most vexing problems that still seems to be facing people when I talk to them about HTTP APIs is how to handle versioning and extensibility — i.e., how they evolve. So, I was quite interested to come across Tom Preston-Werner’s effort to define Semantic Versioning.

Semantic Versioning 2.0.0

Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 Summary Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the: MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes, MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.

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.