Someone on StackOverflow stumbled onto the strange term “open recursion” and asked what it meant. Since most of the other answers to this online are pretty opaque, I started writing an answer. But then I accidentally wrote a blog post.
Cartesian Tree-ProductI have to admit that my day-to-day life involves very little algorithmic problems, but here and there I get a chance to think. In this post, I'd like to discuss an interesting problem that I've met several times already in my programming career, each time in different settings.
The Next Generation Query PlannerThe task of the "query planner" is to figure out the best algorithm or "query plan" to accomplish an SQL statement. Beginning with SQLite version 3.8.0, the query planner component has been rewritten so that it runs faster and generates better plans.
Remember to build for failuresThe Internet is abuzz with talk about failures of the cloud again after a brief AWS outage yesterday in the us-east region that managed to take some high profile sites offline for most of an hour.
Mind the GapUI implementation has an almost natural tendency to diverge from its intended design. Those beautiful pixel-perfect design comps go through the brutal reality of software development in the form of deadlines, roadmap changes, miscommunication, platform limitations, and bugs, lots of bugs.
Reddit: Lessons Learned from Mistakes Made Scaling to 1 Billion Pageviews a MonthJeremy Edberg, the first paid employee at reddit, teaches us a lot about how to create a successful social site in a really good talk he gave at the RAMP conference. Watch it here at Scaling Reddit from 1 Million to 1 Billion–Pitfalls and Lessons. Jeremy uses a virtue and sin approach.
Convenience is KeyProviding convenience is really about products that just-work, are simple to access and use, make sense, do not necessarily burden you with many options, and, at least to me, above all, make dealing with really difficult tasks trivial, even if deep down it really isn’t.
Contract-based programming: making software more reliableBen Brosgol, AdaCore The elements of 'contract-based programming' – assertions of program properties that are part of the source text – have been available in some programming languages for many years but have only recently moved into the mainstream of software development.
On the Cleverness of CompilersThe “Sufficiently Clever Compiler” has become something of a trope in the Lisp community: the mythical beast that promises language and interface designers near-unlimited freedom, and leaves their output in a performance lurch by its non-appearance.
Zero to Sixty in One Second — Acko.netWhen streaming out new pieces of ribbon, the occlusion is baked in on the fly, stored in the unused alpha channel next to the position (RGB).
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.