Thomas Smith

Hyper-scale data centers have a strong need for optimal RPC performance. In this @netdev01 0x17 talk Xiaochun Lu and Zijian Zhang from @BytedanceTalk do a comparative study of gRPC's performance on Homa versus over TCP. Who is prettier? Come and find out #netdevconf

The more of Silicon Valley I’m exposed to the more I’m convinced that 40% of companies that raise money are fraudulent, 58% are real but just never yield returns, and the remaining 2% carry everyone on their backs.

from time to time I think about this post, which I think remains in the top 0.01% of everything I have ever read

@MarcJBrooker queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=… is used in many places, outside of packets. Uber, for example...

- Engineer: I invented this new thing. I call it a ballpen 🖊️ - TwitterSphere: OMG, people could write horrible things with it, like misinformation, propaganda, hate speech. Ban it now! - Writing Doomers: imagine if everyone can get a ballpen. This could destroy society. There should be a law against using ballpen to write hate speech. regulate ballpens now! - Pencil industry mogul: yeah, ballpens are very dangerous. Unlike pencil writing which is erasable, ballpen writing stays forever. Government should require a license for pen manufacturers.

Insanely cool ring buffer trick: abhinavag.medium.com/a-fast-circula…

How can you tell if someone uses io_uring? Don't worry, they will tell you.

@RReverser even for binary states I sometimes find it helpful to use enums, since they often end up percolating to function arguments. easier to read `foo(bar, SomeState)` than `foo(bar, true)` - same applies to match arms

While stuck in a "backlog grooming" meeting reddit.com/r/programmerhu…

When designing APIs, a good angle is "make it easy to use, hard to misuse". I sometimes think of this quote on why it's hard to design a trash container that's bear proof: “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest humans.”

tired of code review? just write the majority of your shit as a library on github and pull it in as third party

The judge in @amazon's sensational lawsuit against my husband tossed out @ajassy's racketeering, fraud and breach of employment contract claims against my husband. For 3 years, Amazon's lawyers - led by Dennis Wallace, Matt Doden and Yousri Omar- sought federal criminal charges against my husband based on an alleged violation of Amazon's Code of Conduct. The judge didn't have to say a THING about the Code in his summary judgment opinion. But he did. Amazon - at best - misled the court. At worst, they knowingly and flat our lied. It's even more horrifying because back in 2020, Amazon obtained an emergency motion to unseal its verified complaint for federal prosecutors - and prosecutors used those allegations to obtain warrants to seize my family's bank accounts via civil forfeiture. Someday, I'll get to see the affidavits under seal. Someday. But for now, at least someone has acknowledged what Amazon did here. And that someone was a federal judge. If Amazon can imprison its employees with false statements - any employer in America can.

There are three types of CEOs

In Big Tech companies, technical decisions are often more nuanced than many engineers realize and are not always based on pure technical merit. Here's a list of things I've actually seen and had to deal with. 🧵

people talking about all the "maintenance" of running servers but my experience is it takes 10x as long to figure out why the nth Lambda in some bizarre chain invoked by api-g failed when I could've just looked at a stack trace in a log

@dvassallo encouraging dogfooding is definitely a thing, but probably more relevant factors are AWS products built by college new hires who have no idea what they're doing and people seeking promotion by jumping on the tech trend du jour

The only reason AWS teams chose to host non-trivial applications on Lambda was because Amazon leadership forced them to. The argument was: “How can we sell something we’re not using ourselves?” and “If we force ourselves to use it, it will become better.”

Everyone is surprised Amazon Prime Video is ditching Lambda for a monolith. I saw Lambda being born, and understood it inside out. I was never convinced it would become a suitable application host. From my book “The Good Parts of AWS” (2019): dvassallo.gumroad.com/l/aws-good-par…

@ranman AWS leadership having no idea what they're doing seems more likely than a company-wide conspiracy to lose money by mandating dumb technical decisions

I remember a conversation with Peter Bell that convinced me that "leaders" have no idea what they're doing - he said "lambda should be like the sum function in excel". The idea that AWS leadership has any input into tech decisions is kind of laughable.

This is completely false. I was there. I have him muted but 50+ people have sent me this nonsense and asked for my comment... so I've conceded. The record needs to be corrected. He's completely incorrect and I have receipts. 🧵

What is ignored by the media -- but will be studied by historians? 8 more examples:

Meetings are the worst! They burn people out and nothing gets done. My tweet on meetings and burn out last week hit a nerve. It resonated with a lot of folks. These are 7 steps I follow to aggressively reduce meetings. A short 🧵