(content warning: blood; I have been advised to change the names of the manufacturers. If you contact me, I can provide the original names.) The last time I went into the office was February 25th. The COVID-19 pandemic was just beginning to unfold in the United States. I had a…

On the Culture of Coffee as a Ritual The South Bay Two and a half years ago, I took a job in the South Bay. The South Bay has plenty of great coffee places — Cat and Cloud, Verve, and Barefoot, just to name a few. …

Recently, there’s been a lot of turmoil in the systems language community. We have the Rust Evangelism Strikeforce nudging us towards rewriting everything in Rust. We have the C++17 folks who promise the safety and ease of use of modern programming languages with the performance and power of C. …

Go has been gaining a ton of popularity as of late. I’ve been using Go for work, working on container management software. Before that, I was writing Erlang, as part of DC/OS. Golang is an incredibly useful, productive language and runtime. It’s almost entirely replaced my usage of Python, and…

Time is deceptively complex. Rarely do we think of it, apart from passing moments of existential crises that we encounter throughout our lives. To software developers, it is perhaps one of the most dangerous traps. In software, you have a half-dozen switches that you must flip to decide on the…

In the past 20 years, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has become the de facto Linux distribution for servers in the enterprise, capturing more than 60% of the paid distribution market. Their position as the market leader makes them the trendsetter for how enterprise software is developed for Linux. …

The Problem A lot of times when a start-up starts to build out their company, they hire smart people to work on problems, and this typically works well — to a point. …

Recently, an internet friend and I were talking about QUIC, Google’s new protocol to replace TCP as an underlying transport for the internet. QUIC itself runs over UDP/80. Given traditional experiences with protocols over UDP, Carrollr protested: < carrollr> Sargun: How does QUIC avoid a) spoofing of source, b) overloading…

With the advent of datacenter-level computation, networks have become key. In datacenter networks, the concerns of network engineers still primarily lie at layers 1–3. Occasionally, layer 4–6 will be inspected upon transforming packets, or making routing decisions. I’ll leave layer 1 out of this, as it’s well isolated, and well…