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Owning a production Postgres database is never boring. The other day, I’m looking for trouble (as I am wont to do), and I notice this weird curve in the production database metrics: So we’ve got these spikes in WALWrite: the number of processes waiting to write to the write-ahead log (or “WAL”). The write-ahead log … Continue reading did u ever read so hard u accidentally wrote?
I recently had the pleasure of reading anthropologist David Graeber’s 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Graeber defines a bullshit job as, a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels … Continue reading Is ops a bullshit job?
Ask an engineering leader about their incident response protocol and they’ll tell you about their severity scale. “The first thing we do is we assign a severity to the incident,” they’ll say, “so the right people will get notified.” And this is sensible. In order to figure out whom to get involved, decision makers need … Continue reading Incident SEV scales are a waste of time
Queues are not just architectural widgets that you can insert into your architecture wherever they're needed. Queues are spontaneously occurring phenomena, just like a waterfall or a thunderstorm.
I was recently delighted to be interviewed by Adam Hawkins on his podcast Small Batches. We discussed a huge variety of topics. Here is the full episode, and on that page you’ll find meticulously timestamped links to specific topics. Check out the rest of Adam’s podcast, it’s phenomenal!
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A large part of our civilisation rests on the shoulders of one medieval monk: Thomas Aquinas. Amid the turmoil of life, riddled with wickedness and pain, he would insist that our world is good. And all our success is built on this belief. Note: Before we start, let’s get one thing out of the way: Thomas Aquinas is clearly a Christian thinker, a Saint even. Yet he was also a brilliant philosopher. So even if you consider yourself agnostic or an atheist, stay with me, you will still enjoy his ideas. What is good? Thomas’ argument is rooted in Aristotle’s concept of goodness: Something is good if it fulfills its function. Aristotle had illustrated this idea with a knife. A knife is good to the extent that it cuts well. He made a distinction between an actual knife and its ideal function. That actual thing in your drawer is the existence of a knife. And its ideal function is its essence—what it means to be a knife: to cut well. So everything is separated into its existence and its ideal essence. And this is also true for humans: We have an ideal conception of what the essence of a human […] The post Thomas Aquinas — The world is divine! appeared first on Ralph Ammer.
My April Cools is out! Gaming Games for Non-Gamers is a 3,000 word essay on video games worth playing if you've never enjoyed a video game before. Patreon notes here. (April Cools is a project where we write genuine content on non-normal topics. You can see all the other April Cools posted so far here. There's still time to submit your own!) April Cools' Club
Everyone wants the software they work on to produce quality products, but what does that mean? In addition, how do you know when you have it? This is the longest single blog post I have ever written. I spent four decades writing software used by people (most of the server
The Ware for March 2025 is shown below. I was just taking this thing apart to see what went wrong, and thought it had some merit as a name that ware. But perhaps more interestingly, I was also experimenting with my cross-polarized imaging setup. This is a technique a friend of mine told me about […]
