In August, LaunchDarkly, Cloudflare, Vercel, and Uber each published a detailed account of a software factory they built. Let’s see how software factories work today and where the approach may lead. A personal note It’s been twelve years since my last post! My most popular posts have always been related to whatever I was working … Read more
Parity protection is a common technique for reliable data storage on mediums that may fail (HDDs, SSDs, storage servers, etc.) Calculation of parity uses tools from algebra in very interesting ways, in particular in the dual parity case. This article is for computer engineers who would like to have a high-level understanding of how the … Read more
Do you know whether this inequality is true? It’s a simple question, but with an intriguing and revealing answer. Infinity #1 One concept of infinity that most people would have encountered in a math class is the infinity of limits. With limits, we can try to understand 2∞ as follows: The infinity symbol is used … Read more
If you had to come up with a way to represent signed integers in 32-bits, how would you do it? One simple solution would be to use one bit to represent the sign, and the remaining 31 bits to represent the absolute value of the number. But as many intuitive solutions, this one is not … Read more
Imagine that 90,000 years ago, every man alive at the time picked a different last name. Assuming that last names are inherited from father to son, how many different last names do you think there would be today? It turns out that there would be only one last name! Similarly, imagine that 200,000 years ago, … Read more
Did you know that the performance of an if-statement depends on whether its condition has a predictable pattern? If the condition is always true or always false, the branch prediction logic in the processor will pick up the pattern. On the other hand, if the pattern is unpredictable, the if-statement will be much more expensive. … Read more
Sometimes you need to access private fields and call private methods on an object – for testing, experimentation, or to work around issues in third-party libraries. .NET has long provided a solution to this problem: reflection. Reflection allows you to call private methods and read or write private fields from outside of the class, but … Read more
The story of how GPU came to be used for high-performance computation is pretty cool. Hardware heavily optimized for graphics turned out to be useful for another use: certain types of high-performance computations. In this article, I will explore how and why this happened, and summarize the state of general computation on GPUs today. Programmable … Read more
The memory model is a fascinating topic – it touches on hardware, concurrency, compiler optimizations, and even math.
The memory model defines what state a thread may see when it reads a memory location modified by other threads. For example, if one thread updates a regular non-volatile field, it is possible that another thread reading the field will never observe the new value. This program never terminates (in a release build):
As a software developer, you certainly have a high-level picture of how web apps work and what kinds of technologies are involved: the browser, HTTP, HTML, web server, request handlers, and so on.
In this article, we will take a deeper look at the sequence of events that take place when you visit a URL.
It all starts here:
The first step in the navigation is to figure out the IP address for the visited domain. The DNS lookup proceeds as follows: