Martin Fowler's Blog, page 7
November 1, 2020
The Death of Goldman Sachs
A misleading title to draw readers into an occasionally true story
A couple of weeks ago Cindy was woken in the wee hours by sounds of
animals fighting in our garden. As she investigated, she saw two coyotes
run off, leaving our cat's body behind. A state of nature is a state of
violence, and our feline predator was quickly turned into prey. Yet our
garden has high fences all around, making it an unlikely spot for coyotes
to explore. So is there more to that night than a simple act of
nature?
October 27, 2020
Should social media dampen uncertain stories?
In last weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign, the New York Post
broke a story alleging corrupt behavior by the family of Joe Biden, a
candidate for President. The story wasn't confirmed by other media
organizations. Supporters of Donald Trump acted to spread the story on
social media, but both Twitter and Netscape took unprecedented efforts to
block the story. That action to block the story became a story in itself,
and there's been much discussion about whether the social media giants
should block a story like this. Reading this discussion I think there's an
important nuance that's been missed, one that applies in general to cases
like this.
October 13, 2020
Thoughts writing a Google App script
Recently a friend of mine asked for a simple program that would
correlate some data drawn from a couple of online services. I decided the
best way to do this for him would be to use a google spreadsheet as the
host, putting the code into the spreadsheet's script area. I'm no expert
in Google App Script, but the exercise led to a few observations, which I
feel compelled to share.
October 1, 2020
Vote Against Trump, Again
I try not to write much about electoral politics, but just as I did
four years ago, I think it's important to vote against Mr Trump. While we
haven't descended as far into authoritarianism as the worst-case fears, we
have taken some significant steps. We must repudiate those steps, and
defeat further ones, by voting against Mr Trump and his enablers.
September 24, 2020
Don't Compare Averages
In business meetings, it's common to compare groups of numbers by
comparing their averages. But doing so often hides important information
in the distribution of the numbers in those groups. There are a number of
data visualizations that shine a light on this information. These include
strip charts, histograms, density plots, box plots, and violin plots.
These are easy to produce with freely available software, working on
groups as small as a dozen, or as large as thousands.
August 30, 2020
A short review of Coup 53
Coup 53 is a recent documentary of the American-led coup against Mohammad
Mosaddegh, the leader of Iran in 1953. It's a worthwhile telling of an
oft-overlooked piece of history, even if the meta-narrative that drives the
documentary isn't properly examined.
August 22, 2020
photostream 124
Two Ocean Lake Trail, Grand Tetons N.P., WY (2011)
August 20, 2020
Distributed Systems Pattern: Singular Update Queue
When the state needs to be updated by multiple concurrent clients, we
need it to be safely updated with one at a time changes. Generally locks
are used to protect against concurrent modifications. But if the tasks
being performed are time consuming, like writing to a file, blocking all
the other calling threads until the task is completed can have severe
impact on overall system throughput and latency. It is important to make
effective use of compute resources, while still maintaining the guarantee
of one at a time execution.
Distributed Systems Pattern: Request Pipeline
Communicating between servers within a cluster using Single Socket
Channel can cause performance issues if requests need to wait for
responses for previous requests to be returned. To achieve better
throughput and latency, the request queue on the server should be filled
enough to make sure server capacity is fully utilized.
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