Recent content in Home on Alex Rasmussen

			 
		 
 A deep dive into the Iceberg open table format, examining the rationale for its creation, internal mechanics, and advanced capabilities. Drawing from years of production experience, this talk offers both theoretical foundations and practical insights for engineers considering adopting Iceberg.

			 
		 
 Amazon S3 advertises 11 9’s of durability for both Standard and One Zone-IA object storage classes. This is a mind-bogglingly high level of durability. The way AWS puts it, if you’ve stored 10 million objects, you can expect to lose about one object about every 10,000 years - even within a single availability zone!

			 
		 
 EarthBound, a role-playing game released for the Super Nintendo in 1994, is one of the most universally revered games of all time. At the core of EarthBound is a super-complex scripting language that controls text, scripted cutscenes, music, sound effects, window management, and more. In this talk, we’ll explore some of the language’s more interesting or…
Everybody’s talking about microservices, but nobody seems to agree on how to make them talk to each other. How should you version your APIs, and how does API version deprecation actually work in practice? Do you use plain old JavaScript object notation (JSON), Thrift, protocol buffers, GraphQL? How do teams communicate changes in their services’ interfaces, and how do consumer services respond?…

			 
		 
 In the past five years, I have spent a lot of time trying to get high-integrity data out of spreadsheets and into databases. In this talk, I explore common data integrity problems when dealing with spreadsheet data, investigate whether those integrity problems are inescapable, and share ongoing work to mitigate them.
This talk examines some lessons learned while building record-setting sorting systems at UC San Diego, and how understanding your hardware, architecting for experimentation, and re-examining your assumptions can make building high-performance systems easier. 
 If you want to dive into TritonSort and Themis in more detail, check out my Ph.D. dissertation . 
 Video and slides are available…

			 
		 
 In January 2015, I gave a talk at Papers We Love, a meetup in San Francisco for engineers who like talking about computer science research. The talk focuses on Flat Datacenter Storage and the example it can set for system designers. 
 Slides on SlideShare . 
 My talk was preceded by a lightning talk by Sargun Dhillon on VL2. It’s useful…