Four short links: 24 September 2018
Continuous Delivery, Turing Complete Powerpoint, ARPA-E, and Observability
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Drone — a continuous delivery platform built on Docker, written in Go. A continuous delivery system built on container technology. Drone uses a simple YAML configuration file, a superset of
docker-compose, to define and execute pipelines inside Docker containers. - On the Turing Completeness of Powerpoint (YouTube) — Video highlighting my research on PowerPoint Turing Machines for CMU’s SIGBOVIK 2017. (via Andy Baio)
- ARPA-E: Successful, and Struggling — In Cory Doctorow’s words, ARPA-E is a skunkworks project that gives out grants for advanced sustainable energy research that’s beyond the initial phases but still too nascent to be commercialized. They’ve focused on long-term energy storage (a key piece of the picture with renewables) and the portfolio of inventions that have emerged from their funding is mind-bogglingly cool. Reminds me of Doing Innovation in the Capitalist Economy, by Bill Janeway, who argues that the state funds early research until VCs have commercialization opportunities (this explains why VCs are heavy in biotech and internet…they’ve been foci of state-funded research for decades). Such a good book, by the way.
- Structured Logs vs. Events (Twitter) — Charity Majors drops some great clue bombs about observability. The most effective way to structure your instrumentation, so you get the maximum bang for your buck, is to emit a single arbitrarily wide event per request per service hop. We’re talking wide. We usually see 200-500 dimensions in a mature app. But just one write. […] All of it. In one fat structured blob. Not sprinkled around your code in functions like satanic fairy dust. You will crush your logging system that way, and you’d need to do exhaustive post-processing to recreate the shared context by joining on request-id (if you’re lucky).
