Many years ago, I was struck by the similarity between two very well-known fairy tales from Charles Perrault: Cinderella and Donkeyskin. …

Near the middle of A Room of One’s Own, while considering what could have been the life of women during the past centuries, Virginia Woolf regrets that they are largely absent from the writings of historians (themselves mostly men), unless they’re an Elizabeth, or a Mary. Remarkably, she published this…

In popular culture, the words “Turing Test” evoke a simple dialogue, a series of questions and answers, between a human interrogator and a computer, where the task of the computer is to make the interrogator believe that it’s actually a human being. Usually the discussion happens through some kind of…

At Booking.com, we’re big fans of monitoring. With the usual battery of system-level monitors, we keep an eye on the health of our servers. As you would expect from any commercial internet company, we also keep track of various business metrics. However, we also collect data specifically for monitoring the performance of our applications and subsystems. — We’re practitioners of frequent and liberal deployment (our twist on continuous deployment), and as such we need to quickly pinpoint any problem introduced by a specific code roll-out, or by the activation of a new feature — either plain run-time application errors, or noticeable performance problems. …