Joe Magerramov's blog: The New Calculus of AI-based Coding
A collection of posts by Joe Magerramov| blog.joemag.dev
If you work with multi-tenant systems you are probably familiar with the concept of throttling or admission control. The idea is pretty simple and is rooted in the common human desire for fairness: when using a shared system or resource no customer should be able to consume "too much" of that resource and negatively impact other customers. What constitutes "too much" can vary a lot and will usually depend on technical, product, business, and even social factors.| Joe Magerramov's blog
When working on distributed systems, it's not uncommon to need a piece of logic that executes across the entire system. Some examples of that can be a task that deletes tomb-stoned records, or a task that periodically updates system-wide configuration, or perhaps a piece of code that continuously scans the entire fleet replacing unhealthy hosts. In my experience, most distributed systems have at least one such component.| Joe Magerramov's blog
I was at an airport during a recent business trip, watching planes take off and land when I saw the iconic Boeing 747 take off. This reminded me how growing up, 747 was a favorite. There is just something special about a double-decker jumbo jet capable of flying long range routes. But the one factor that endeared me to 747 above all else were its four engines. Perhaps as a foreshadowing of my future interests, it just felt inherently more reliable to fly on a plane with that level of redundan...| Joe Magerramov's blog
In this post, I wanted to make a quick observation about batching as an underused technique in distributed systems. Systems folks have long used batching as an effective way to increase the throughput of the system. This works by amortizing the overhead of an expensive action (such as device IO or a syscall) over multiple operations. Yet, outside of non-realtime systems, batching is rarely used within distributed services.| Joe Magerramov's blog
The topic of software performance and efficiency has been making rounds this month, especially around engineers not being able to influence their leadership to invest in performance. For many engineers, performance work tends to be some of the most fun and satisfying engineering projects. If you are like me, you love seeing some metric or graph show a step function improvement - my last code commit this year was one such effort, and it felt great seeing the results:| Joe Magerramov's blog
In a recent operational review, a colleague brought up how past feedback from me has influenced his team's avoidance of feature flags. If we ever worked together, then you too probably heard me grumble about the downsides of feature flags. So should feature flags be avoided at all costs? My opinions on this topic are nuanced, so I thought it would be worth writing them down. But first, what do we even have in mind when we talk about feature flags? When I think about feature flags, I tend to t...| Joe Magerramov's blog
A collection of posts by Joe Magerramov| blog.joemag.dev
A collection of posts by Joe Magerramov| blog.joemag.dev
A collection of posts by Joe Magerramov| blog.joemag.dev
A collection of posts by Joe Magerramov| blog.joemag.dev
