Disqus - Latest Comments for bdarfler

Re: Employee Equity is Broken, Here’s Our Fix

bdarfler — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 16:38:35 -0000

Have you seen https://open.buffer.com/exp...

Re: Good engineering managers aren't just hard to find -- they don't exit | VentureBeat | Business | by Juan Pablo Dellarroquelle, Medallia

bdarfler — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 17:21:02 -0000

I can only talk from my own experience but after years of working in some of the most cutting edge technology I could find I looked around and realized that the tech was the easy part. The biggest challenge I saw was the lack of competent engineering managers. In short I saw exactly what @Juan Dellarroquelle saw.

Inspired by the few run ins with really great managers that I have had I was excited by the thought of trying my own hand at the problem. I knew what I wanted from my managers and my company in the past and I was excited to try and create that environment for my fellow engineers. I work hard at being responsive to the team and helping them drive towards the best practices and processes that support them in their day to day.

Service to others and creating a high functioning team is the benefit and the reward that makes management awesome. If you cannot find the joy in that framework then by all means, keep being a top notch engineer. Its not for everyone. However, for those that love coding, but find the human component lacking at times, this is a great position to move into where you are helping create both an amazing product and infusing that with helping to create a great team.

Re: SARIT: A PASSION PROJECT — Alan Kaye vs. The Serenity Prayer

bdarfler — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 06:24:02 -0000

The first season rocks. The second season is not nearly as good but I'm told to power through anyhow. (I haven't made it through personally).

Also, sounds like you are doing an awesome job of figuring this all out. I really enjoy following the story.

Re: Benjamin Darfler - High Performance Rails (long edition)

bdarfler — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 15:56:08 -0000

Thats about right. Rails scales! The trick is to not actually use it for anything important.

Re: What is TokuMX fractal tree-based storage?

bdarfler — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 21:48:03 -0000

Tokutek was started by the author of the Cache Oblivious Streaming B-Tree paper seen here http://citeseerx.ist.psu.ed... and the technology started as an implementation of the data structure in the paper.

However, its my understanding is that its turned more into a b-tree with write buffers at each level such that writes are amortized and leaf nodes are larger which allows for better compression. http://www.tokutek.com/reso...

Re: The Consistency Alphabet Soup :: Hacking, Distributed

bdarfler — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 21:22:32 -0000

Brewer is quite clear that C as in ACID is not the same C as in CAP.

"The relationship between CAP and ACID is more complex and often misunderstood, in part because the C and A in ACID represent different concepts than the same letters in CAP and in part because choosing availability affects only some of the ACID guarantees."

http://www.infoq.com/articl...

Re: MySQL Reference Architectures for Massively Scalable Web Infrastructure

bdarfler — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 10:15:39 -0000

Registration free link

http://www.oracle.com/us/pr...

Re: Overview of Dremel-Like Solutions: Moving Beyond Hadoop for Big Data Needs

bdarfler — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 06:49:15 -0000

What an odd list of tools. SAP HANA and Druid both of which are purely in memory without mentioning Google PowerDrill. Google Dremel and Impala which are for PB scale while not mentioning Apache Drill. Then StreamReduce without mentioning Storm that powers it nor any other stream processing systems like StreamBase. And finally ignoring column store databases like Vertica, Infobright, ParAccel, etc. all together.

I might suggest users check out my blog post instead http://codedependents.com/2...

Re: Amazon DynamoDB Is Not Production Ready

bdarfler — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 07:43:23 -0000

I couldn't agree with you more. Three points to clarify:
Async is a library issue not a service issue. The Java API already supports async.

The first issue is known if you increase the write capacity on a large dataset under high load. AWS has to copy your data to more servers in the background all while not impacting your online performance so it does it very slowly. Data migration under load is never easy or fast. Of course the OP doesn't say anything about the circumstances so maybe they are seeing something else. They should open a ticket with AWS.

Finally, DynamoDB is in public (not private) beta.

Re: TerminalColours SIMBL plugin under Lion

bdarfler — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:50:52 -0000

This works but when I ssh to a machine and open up a file with VI I get the following error in the console.

1/6/12 2:32:15.101 PM Terminal: -[__NSCFNumber hasSuffix:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x6e69625f62757473

1/6/12 2:32:15.105 PM Terminal: (
0 CoreFoundation 0x00007fff919e5286 __exceptionPreprocess + 198
1 libobjc.A.dylib 0x00007fff88951d5e objc_exception_throw + 43
2 CoreFoundation 0x00007fff91a714ce -[NSObject doesNotRecognizeSelector:] + 190
3 CoreFoundation 0x00007fff919d2133 ___forwarding___ + 371
4 CoreFoundation 0x00007fff919d1f48 _CF_forwarding_prep_0 + 232
5 TerminalColours 0x00000001132dea06 -[NSObject(TTProfile_TerminalColours) TerminalColours_TTProfile_valueForKey:] + 44
6 TerminalColours 0x00000001132ded7b -[NSView(TTView) TerminalColours_colorForANSIColor:] + 72
7 Terminal 0x000000010f7027e7 Terminal + 387047
8 Terminal 0x000000010f6c742a Terminal + 144426
9 Terminal 0x000000010f6c69ba Terminal + 141754
10 AppKit 0x00007fff8e673fdf -[NSView _drawRect:clip:] + 3758
11 AppKit 0x00007fff8e6a18c4 -[NSView _recursiveDisplayAllDirtyWithLockFocus:visRect:] + 1583
12 AppKit 0x00007fff8e6715ba -[NSView _recursiveDisplayRectIfNeededIgnoringOpacity:isVisibleRect:rectIsVisibleRectForView:topView:] + 1032
13 AppKit 0x00007fff8e67286f -[NSView _recursiveDisplayRectIfNeededIgnoringOpacity:isVisibleRect:rectIsVisibleRectForView:topView:] + 5821
14 AppKit 0x00007fff8e67286f -[NSView _recursiveDisplayRectIfNeededIgnoringOpacity:isVisibleRect:rectIsVisibleRectForView:topView:] + 5821
15 AppKit 0x00007fff8e67286f -[NSView _recursiveDisplayRectIfNeededIgnoringOpacity:isVisibleRect:rectIsVisibleRectForView:topView:] + 5821
16 AppKit 0x00007fff8e67286f -[NSView _recursiveDisplayRectIfNeededIgnoringOpacity:isVisibleRect:rectIsVisibleRectForView:topView:] + 5821
17 AppKit 0x00007fff8e67286f -[NSView _recursiveDisplayRectIfNeededIgnoringOpacity:isVisibleRect:rectIsVisibleRectForView:topView:] + 5821
18 AppKit 0x00007fff8e670ab3 -[NSThemeFrame _recursiveDisplayRectIfNeededIgnoringOpacity:isVisibleRect:rectIsVisibleRectForView:topView:] + 270
19 AppKit 0x00007fff8e66bec9 -[NSView _displayRectIgnoringOpacity:isVisibleRect:rectIsVisibleRectForView:] + 4755
20 AppKit 0x00007fff8e66493e -[NSView displayIfNeeded] + 1676
21 AppKit 0x00007fff8e66407d _handleWindowNeedsDisplayOrLayoutOrUpdateConstraints + 648
22 CoreFoundation 0x00007fff919a4f37 __CFRUNLOOP_IS_CALLING_OUT_TO_AN_OBSERVER_CALLBACK_FUNCTION__ + 23
23 CoreFoundation 0x00007fff919a4e96 __CFRunLoopDoObservers + 374
24 CoreFoundation 0x00007fff9197a159 __CFRunLoopRun + 825
25 CoreFoundation 0x00007fff91979ae6 CFRunLoopRunSpecific + 230
26 HIToolbox 0x00007fff8f23d3d3 RunCurrentEventLoopInMode + 277
27 HIToolbox 0x00007fff8f24463d ReceiveNextEventCommon + 355
28 HIToolbox 0x00007fff8f2444ca BlockUntilNextEventMatchingListInMode + 62
29 AppKit 0x00007fff8e6283f1 _DPSNextEvent + 659
30 AppKit 0x00007fff8e627cf5 -[NSApplication nextEventMatchingMask:untilDate:inMode:dequeue:] + 135
31 AppKit 0x00007fff8e62462d -[NSApplication run] + 470
32 AppKit 0x00007fff8e8a380c NSApplicationMain + 867
33 Terminal 0x000000010f6a51a4 Terminal + 4516
)

Re: MongoDB and Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS)

bdarfler — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 08:49:30 -0000

To each their own. EBS has variability but it also has significantly better random I/O performance when RAIDed. You'll notice that Foursquare uses RAIDed EBS volumes for their setup as does my company.

Re: http://bdarfler.com/post/5361404447

bdarfler — Fri, 13 May 2011 11:19:22 -0000

I love tool sharpening, I just have a hard time being asked to mine ore for the tools with my bare hands as a pre requisite for getting hired as a craftsman but then I guess it depends on what you associate with mining and what you associate with tool sharpening in this analogy. I'm curious what you would think of an interview where you were asked to whiteboard code to print the contents of a binary tree in order.

Re: Finger Lakes Wine Tasting

bdarfler — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 13:33:46 -0000

Born and raised in Ithaca area. Been wine tasting 3 time around Cayuga and Seneca lakes but never been up to Keuka lake where the Dr Konstantin and Ravines are from. There, now I'm no longer a lurker ;-)

Re: Approximating Java Case Objects without Project Lombok

bdarfler — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 08:18:34 -0000

That is quite true though arguably even more magical since there is no way other than seeing and understanding the @Data annotation to know that there are methods there that are not in the source.

Re: http://bdarfler.com/post/755992611

bdarfler — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 11:41:28 -0000

I skim and I have nothing to do at my day job, hence the new digs starting in Aug.

Re: Queuing Options

bdarfler — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:07:33 -0000

Thanks for letting me know, I was looking for free / open source options.

Re: http://bdarfler.com/post/576923827

bdarfler — Sat, 08 May 2010 14:20:33 -0000

Just make it all stateless, possibly in Scala ;-)

Re: http://bdarfler.com/post/496420679

bdarfler — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 08:23:59 -0000

Haha, well don't I look like an idiot. Like I said, no one should have to know that detail ;-)

As an isolated programming challenge, implementing a BST is probably a good exercise. You get to challenge the coders knowlage of the language, basic tree alorigims, probably some recurison, and their fundamentals on how a tree works. However, my annoyance is that the BST, and a handful of other questions, are so common and over used that they become an oppertunity for an interview to simply memorize the code without having to go through the process of figuring it out eachtime. I know, for instance, that I wow'ed the crap out of the engineer at LocaModa when I came up with the algorighm he asked for instantly, fully optimized, including some esoteric short cut I didn't fully grock simply because I had already been asked that question and shown that optimization a few interviews earlier. I then have to assume that at any given company I interview with, I'm competing against other interviewees that either had more interviews recently or took the time to really go back and study their data structurs and algoritms such that these questions are a matter of how fast they can write and not about their programming skills. Its this assumption that makes it particularly stressful to whip up this kind of code on the spot.

Re: http://bdarfler.com/post/496420679

bdarfler — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 22:08:36 -0000

I feel like we are so very close in opinion yet couch it in different terms. For instance, you asked the question when to use a hashmap vs an array which is exactly a use case question. Moreover, understanding at a high level that a hashmap is a set of buckets that are populated by hashing a key easily gets you an understanding of sizing a hashmap and the importance of a hashcode() without needing to be able to pull off an implementation on demand. (BTW, the C is not capitalized, at least not in Java, but thats a detail that no one should have to have memorized ;-)) Likewise knowing that a binary search tree is a tree structure where objects of a higher value are on the right side of a given node and of a lesser value on the left side of a node and that it gives log(O) search performance allows you to extrapolate almost all other concerns without having to crank out an optimized implementation over the course of a 30 min interview.

Re: What Is Your Constructive Feedback For MEN?

bdarfler — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:59:00 -0000

My constructive feedback for MEN is...

learn to understand and fulfill your physical, mental, and emotional needs so you can serve the people and comittments in your life.

Ben, 27, Boston MA

Re: Our Development Process

bdarfler — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:21:24 -0000

I'm dying to know what kinda of performance tests you plan on adding to automated builds. I have been pondering this a while but I'm not sure how to go about this or what should be monitored. Our build machine is a bit slow and so tests that run on a dev laptop sometimes fail (time out) on our build machine. I have yet to find a good blog post or other information on best practices with performance tests, just that they should be done.

Re: http://crunchyjew.tumblr.com/post/356186235

bdarfler — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 11:44:58 -0000

I disagree, the author comments a few times that buying a house is all about dropping roots and raising a family. The author mentions that he brought a house so he could have a back yard and a garden, etc. Just like your friend, the home was purchased with the idea that it wouldn't pay for anything.

My comment was exactly to that end as well. I don't want to drop roots and raise a family yet so I'm in no hurry to buy a house since it isn't a very good short term investment which is the only reason I would purchase it now.

Re: How to combine personal and professional online without pissing people off

bdarfler — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 11:33:17 -0000

I kinda view it like people can pick and choose what parts of the content I generate they are interested in and then subscribe to only those parts. Nothing I do is too off the wall, thats just my nature, so yes its somewhat clean and professional everywhere. But most people don't want to be inundated with the youtube video I just saw and my political leanings. If they do then they can follow my tumblr, if they don't then they can leave it. Its putting the choice in their hands and making a point that one side is a bit more professional and one side is a bit more personal. I hope in this day and age people can respect the difference and subscribe as they will.

Re: How to combine personal and professional online without pissing people off

bdarfler — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 12:20:49 -0000

My solution to this issue is to have a variety of blogs and tumblr accounts which I can mix and match as I see fit. My professional site at http://bdarfler.com is a tumblr page that I post interesting links, and aggregate a photoblog and software blog. Everything there is auto tweeted to @bdarfler. Additionally, I have another tumblr for more off humor comics, links and videos which ends up on facebook for my friends to see.

Re: The Facebook Relationship

bdarfler — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:42:47 -0000

Damn, disqus made that so easy to sign up I created a new account with a typo name.