[…] I was able to have a relatively discrete view of current system status and performance in realtime. You need this sort of realtime data if you’re going to be able to achieve the goal we had here, which was to rapidly scale up and down in response to demand. - Matthew Rothenberg
- [RCr] Amazon Profits https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/9/6/amazons-profits
“As an intellectual exercise, it’s interesting to think about what this would look like if the accounting rules were different and everything sold and processed through Amazon’s website was reported as Amazon revenue. On an operational level, this is pretty much what happens today: Amazon’s own ecommerce product teams are charged an internal fee by the logistics platform and by the digital platform in much the same way that external marketplace vendors are charged a fee. Hence, if these were reported on a like-for-like basis, Amazon’s revenue in 2019 would have been close to $450bn.” - Benedict Evans
“With this automation we were able to spot we were going out of disk space for a couple of clusters which we didn’t expect. We have over 20 clusters and have updates for all of them every day. This dashboard is used not only by our colleagues who are direct customers of ClickHouse® but by the team who makes a plan for buying servers. It is easy to read and costs none of developers time.” - Oxana Kharitonova
“We carefully monitor startup performance using an automated test that runs for almost every change to the code. This test was created very early in the project, when Google Chrome did almost nothing, and we have always followed a very simple rule:
This test can never get any slower.
Because it’s much easier to address performance problems as they are created than fixing them later, we are quick to fix or revert any regressions. As a result, our very large application starts as fast today as the very lightweight application we started out with.” - Brett Wilson, Chrome Software Engineer
- [ET] Personal Data Warehowses - Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data
“Everyone watching this talk uses SQLite every day, even if you don’t know it. Most iPhone apps use SQLite, many desktop apps do, it’s even running inside my Apple Watch. One of my favourite features is that a SQLite database is a single file on disk. This makes it easy to copy, send around and also means I can bundle data up in that single file, include it in a Docker file and deploy it to serverless hosts to serve it on the internet” - Simon Willison
After nearly 3 years, we are throwing away 99% of the code we ever wrote, and we are launching an entirely new product. In other words, we are breaking up with our solution to fall in love with the problem again - Julien Berthomier
“The best software design is simple and easy to understand. The next time you’re starting a new project, instead of thinking, “How will I architect this system, what battle-tested patterns should I use and what formal methodology should I document it with?”, think “How can I come up with the simplest possible design, in a way that’s easy for anyone to understand?”. - Gergely Orosz
