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I’ve been thinking about the lessons distributed systems engineers learn on the job. A great deal of our instruction is through scars made by mistakes made in production traffic. These scars are useful reminders, sure, but it’d be better to have more engineers with the full count of their fingers.New systems engineers will find the Fallacies of Distributed Computing and the CAP theorem as part of their self-education. But these are abstract pieces without the direct, actionable advice the inexperienced engineer needs to start moving[1]. It’s surprising how little context new engineers are given when they start out.Below is a list of some lessons

This article presents the Java 7 answer to the automatic resource management problem in the form of a new language construct, proposed as part of Project Coin, called the try-with-resources statement.

The typical Java application manipulates several types of resources such as files, streams, sockets, and database connections. Such resources must be handled with great care, because they acquire system resources for their operations. Thus, you need to ensure that they get freed even in case of errors. Indeed, incorrect resource management is a common source of failures in production applications, with the usual

More from Hacker News. I figure this might be of interest to folks working on parallel systems. I'll let KirinDave kick us off with:

It's parallel in the same sense that any POSIX program is: Node pays a higher cost than real parallel VMs in serialization across IPC boundaries, not being able to take advantage of atomic CPU operations on shared data structures, etc. At least it did last time I looked. Maybe they're doing some shm-style magic/semaphore stuff now. Still going to pay the context switch cost.

Threads and processes both require a context switch, but on posix

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