Threads for robdaemon

I’d argue that any source you can’t get easily is proprietary, it doesn’t matter if that is the source code to a website or the source code to Windows. If I can’t get the source without contacting someone at the company then it is not open source, therefore until it is open source I would call it proprietary.

I find this comment bigoted and offensive. Would you say the same about blacks changing your neighborhoods? Hispanics?

If a company I worked for failed to pay me, even if it was a payroll downtime issue - I would be looking for a new job asap.

I make some exceptions for tools that are easily replaceable. I’m currently betting on a new datastore, but it’s fed via a standard protocol (graphite wire format). If I decide to ditch that portion it won’t be very hard because none of the inputs or outputs will have to be changed (although I will have a few hundred gb of data to move).

So they wrote one half in C++ and the other half in Java… if the Java part was only for dealing with building Java stuff, that would be ok I guess, but it seems it does a lot more.

Also, the system appears to run on everyones development machines as well, no?

Hey, OP here. First off, keep in mind whenever a technique is blogged it has to be simplified or the blog post would be unreadably long. So, yes, this technique is used in real code for managing a multi-goroutine system. But in the blog example it’s just one, which makes it look like overkill. It’s a simple technique that really gives you a lot of growth and power as the code complexity increases.

Second, I am not using timeouts and I am only using a single goroutine to run assertions in sync with the executing code. IMO this is the actual power of the technique: the fact that the assertion code is forced to sync with the executing code so that every call to the fake is accounted for and correct. It’s quite strict.

I would like to see an example of a serial implementation. My guess is you would store the call and then have a method to retrieve it? This becomes difficult when one method call to the unit under test executes three calls to the same method on the fake. You need to start storing arrays of calls and be able to inspect an array of responses. IMO channels are actually simpler!

Feel free to continue the discussion here or on the comments section of the site. I’d love more feedback on the technique.

I have no idea what problems the OP is trying to solve, but you will on occasion see goroutines/channels used as an implementation detail in order to expose an API that is safe to call from multiple goroutines simultaneously. i.e., “thread safe.” I have no idea whether this is what the OP was trying to do or not.

Reading these posts is how people know what to support. Writing them is essential to the process. Writing lots of them and getting people saturated in them is, too. What looks inescapable to those in an echo chamber is often the thing that is only just getting noticed in the mainstream. Also, solely private (and therefore quiet) support does not spread well and gets squashed easily.

Pushing back against those who document our troubles is counter-productive. It inhibits the growth of corrective movements right as they need it the most.

Another good reason to support this kind of work is that people who do not support the changes that you and I want say things just like what you’ve said. Everybody supporting the status quo has lots to say about how people moving for change are doing it wrong! Somehow, it’s never quite good enough.

Personally I really like her “Why” answer.

The environments we work in can be pretty toxic, and are harming even the most alpha of males. (Just count the levels of obesity, stress, type two diabetes, heart disease, depression, anxiety…. around you). (Yes, all that _is_related, read Robert Sapolsky’s “Why Zebras don’t get Ulcers” to get the science behind that statement).

So it is not just a “Gender Issue”. It is a quality of life issue for all of us.

Please always consider that this blog post is written by a person that can actually spend a week drinking after being fired and then some to search for a new job.

I feel that this comment is fairly morally judgmental. I took the piece to be more of an expression of a fear-turned-reality that many in our profession can relate to. If the post were written by someone who spoke of spending a week surrounded by family, I think it would be pretty strange to say “Please always consider that this blog post is written by a person that can actually spend a week with family after being fired and then some to search for a new job.”

Normally you’re offered severance pay, so most people actually can afford to sit around for a week (or a month). Being fired is an emotionally exhausting experience. You really need to take some time off before looking for the next thing. But it can also be a great turning point if you give yourself time to recoup.

From what I gather “one giant Perforce repository with all code used in the company” is a surprisingly common version-control model at large companies.

We do that at my company (on a much smaller scale than Google) and I there are a lot of benefits. All our services and shared library code is in the same repo. It means every commit to the repo leaves every service fully in sync with one another for interface and data versions - no dependency management needed. It also makes git bisect awesome for bug tracking since all our code builds reliabily at every commit you bisect to.

Also it implies shared code ownership which I like. Anyone can fix anything and run all the tests for all the services at once and know nothing is broken.

That seems awful to me for some reason.

Agree. Not sure why the title doesn’t use at least scare quotes for “solution”:

Basically they are saying “We put every single piece of code we need into a global repository, and pretty much don’t care about anyone not doing this. Let’s just standardize some of the dirty hacks and workarounds seen in the wild so that we can keep not caring about it.”

It scares the hell out of me when I imagine inexperienced people learning Go and thinking that this is the best way to manage dependencies in 2015.

It’s not their Go code, Google keep all their code in a single epic repository.

the conversations are still valuable to have, because in their absence the default assumption is that the community is fine with linus being a jerk, and people who do object are reluctant to speak up and be the lone dissenting voice.

Many (but not all) of the times I’ve seen people complain about Linus, he was simply being honest or blunt. Perhaps it’s a cultural thing, we Americans frequently get offended by hearing things we don’t like, and sugar-coating is a way of life for us. In contrast, in many European countries, being honest and factual (or blunt) is the norm and not in any way considered insulting.

The article covers this in detail, but basically, the language itself is feature complete, but certain sections of the standard library will still be changing. Six weeks from now, in beta, everything will be in what we expect the final form to be for 1.0.

I bought a top of the line macbook pro 15" a few months ago and I can’t say that “Shit Just Works” has been my experience at all. It’s been ok but there’s a lot that’s just buggy or badly designed about it.

• The keyboard scratches the screen when carrying it in my bag. According to the forums that’s normal - macbooks have “always done this”. When I pay for the fanciest screen on the market I don’t expect it to be self-scratching.

• The bluetooth randomly fails and needs rebooting.

• The Wifi reports high signal strength even when it’s marginal. This flaw is compounded by its wifi range not being particularly good either, so it reports full signal even when it’s so marginal that the network is often unavailable.

• The OS occasionally crashes. Not often enough to be a huge problem but linux is much more reliable.

• The “magic mouse” is an ergonomics disaster with terrible battery life. You end up clutching on to the hard edges of a piece of flat plastic. It looks great, sure, but it definitely wasn’t designed for humans to use.

Overall I’d rate it as pretty average in terms of problems. I’d just expected better than average when paying top dollar.

I came to the conclusion recently that I’ll replace my existing work 11" Macbook Air with a Thinkpad when the time comes. I recently bought an old X220 to run Arch to see if I could use Linux day to day and I’ve been incredibly happy with the results.

Currently the only piece of software that we use at work that’s OS X specific is [Sketch] (http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch/), which I can see us ditching as time goes by. I’m also perfectly happy to be handed a PSD that I can open in GIMP in that particular case.

Reading this post make me realise just how frequently I run up against OS X oddities, in particular the amount of times that system daemons start hogging resources big-time. When the majority of my time is spent in Vim and iTerm 2 there’s no need to use OS X and have to work around its intricacies.

Why not stick with the apple hardware, keep osx for the battery life and device support, and dev in a linux vm?

I recently started dual booting gentoo and osx on my macbook pro, and I’ve really been enjoying it. I play with a lot of languages, libraries, and tools, and I benefit from gentoo’s system of being able to specify what kind of support you want compiled into your tools in one place, and have your new things support each other right away. It was interesting to get my company’s vpn client to work, and its instability is why I am usually on OSX while at work, but at home I’m usually on gentoo. My home desktop dual boots arch and windows, because I don’t tinker with it as much and I just want it to work in a generic way with low effort. I’ve heard good things about nixos, and that may be the next one I play with.

I also find some things about recent OSX versions to be a bit irritating/galling, but on the whole it isn’t too bad. I moved away from linux because while it worked great as a desktop and a server², on a laptop it was a rather really awful experience.

That was maybe 6 years ago, and you would think in the interim things would have gotten much better. Reading various articles/comments/posts in the interim, it seems this has not improved as much as I would have hoped – the blame likely lay at the feet of the hardware manufacturers more than the kernel and distro devs, but who knows.

External pressures aside, a new operating system generally has to be more than just a little better for users to switch. Not just a different set of pain, but either significantly less pain, or some facility that is so much better that it “eats” the entire cost of switching.

OSX had that when I switched – really great hardware, better font rendering, laptop suspend worked reliably, wireless worked, bluetooth worked, screen brightness controls worked, audio even worked, apps installed easily without having to search for random libs, a more uniform look (no gtk/qt disparity) and conventions, had unixy bits available (terminal, bash, vim, etc).

Running Windows with something like FreeBSD in a VM does sound interesting, but I spend so much time either in a terminal or a web browser, that I don’t know that Windows would add much value for me. I also haven’t found many of the changes in the last few versions of OSX to be that awful truth be told.

If you have mac hardware though, try running windows on it and see how it goes? A couple guys at work do that, I hear that works rather decently.

²: Have since switched to FreeBSD for person stuff. Still use linux at work though (not my choice)

@apy @robdaemon Apart from your web browser, terminals and text editor, is there any other applications you run in the native host operating system (Windows in your case)? For example, what do you use for your email? Do you use a git repository viewer (like gitk)? Do you native apps like Skype/HipChat/etc.? Do you use screen sharing apps (like join.me)? Do you use some kind of office suite (like LibreOffice)?

I occasionally use things like Skype or Google Hangouts, but I expect them to be well supported in Windows. The main thing that I like about OS X is being Unix at the core so using it is nice to jump down to a command line. But I think for my needs cygwin + putty cygwin would work well enough for my needs. I think I would mostly use Windows as just a virtual machine host.

I initially started by having a good fat desktop computer running VMS

blinks, re-reads, oh, right.

What’s really holding me back is that we have Apple Thunderbolt displays at the office and they only work with Macbooks and OS X

The Thunderbolt display will work with Windows, including all the port expansion functionality, but I can’t speak as to how well it works with non-Apple hardware.

It’s not just regulations, it’s the bureaucratic attitudes of the politicos. Note that Overland Park lost their shot (they’re in Kansas, a red state) because they were being PITAs, not because they have specific regulations obligating them to put Google through the ringer.

Everything has a cost. We should keep this in mind.

I believe @robdaemon’s point is not whether Zookeeper is any good, but rather why should one trust Eureka is correct at all. What is the algorithm behind guaranteeing a Eureka node converges on a correct state?

I don’t believe the datastructures would allow for duplicates, but missing entries sure, probably possible. During normal operation however, checkins are replicated to all servers which fixes up missing entries pretty quick, except during partition events. In that case, you probably have bigger problems than load distribution.

Maybe it’s more constructive to frame this as: what guarantees do you want from your service discovery mechanism in the presence of network partitions?

With zookeeper the guarantee is: you will either get the network consensus answer, or no answer at all. With Eureka it sounds like the answer is: you will always be told about any services that the node you’re talking to has received recent updates from, and you will sometimes be told about services that are in fact down. We could formally model/prove these I guess, but IMO the main use of these formal models is assuring you that particular invariants are maintained (e.g. that the results of a sequence of compare-and-swap operations on the same field will admit a serializable ordering), and I don’t think there are really any relevant invariants for the service discovery use case.