Suppose you are playing Dungeons & Dragons (or Bunkers & Badasses). Suppose you throw 20 20-sided dice. What are the chances of getting a least a single dice with a 1? Well, the easier way to formulate that question is to ask the dual question: “what is the chance that…

Edit: some word choices have been altered slightly in order to make some parts more clear. This is a short blurb about a specific optimization present in Erlang 20.0 which is scheduled for release in June 2017. The README file mentions the following: OTP-13529 Application(s): erts Erlang literals…

Suppose you have a bounded queue of size 10. In a normal setting, you system may load this queue with up to 5 elements. Under load, the queue might increase to say 7 or 8 elements, but you are not going to reach the bound of the queue. …

In the recent years, I have adopted a method for system design, which I think yields good results. For a lack of better word, I overloaded “stack” yet again, and use it as a metaphor for this design. As everything else, it isn’t a silver bullet. There are other designs…

Grandma and Grandpa had an election. Grandpa won. Why did grandpa win? Whenever the election is over, pundits will find their particular horse in the race and ride it into oblivion. The seemingly deep question to answer is “why did Trump win over Clinton?”, mostly because it was seen as…

The track of automation — We’ve been having a slow revolution for the last 30 years. This revolution is the gradual increase of automation in our society, and now it has come to the point where it wreaks havoc in politics as well. It started when manufacturing plants replaced their workers with robots. The robot…

While “Rees on OO” is impossible to reach, we can still try: Functional programming is a set of different features. These features are taken, in an à la carte fashion by people in order to argue that their particular set is what constitutes FP. …

— An incomplete opinionated guide. — Preparation The first decision is easily the most important. It is one of ideology: the developers are in control of the software. Not the other way around. Managers are not in control of the software. Product Owners are not in control of the software. Developers are. …

You embark upon the journey. You build the system. You test the system. The system seems to work. You spend time deploying the system into production. And then what? The maintenance period of a project is often measured in years, whereas the time to build the project is measured in…