So, about a week ago I made a post that talked about Satori , an exciting experimental garbage collector that showed pareto front advances of key metrics. Put another way, this GC seems to offer a new level of near minimal STW pause durations, minimal heap sizes and strong throughput performance in a number of synthetic benchmarks. Initial benchmarking showed Satori as a shooting star of low…
Be sure to checkout my follow up post: A week with Satori, the experimental low-latency GC for .NET Howdy folks, I wanted to bring your attention to a Github discussion over in the .NET runtime where an experimental Garbage Collector called Satori has emerged that is producing very exciting numbers for those of us in the .NET performance crowd. Quick Links: - The discussion thread - The comment…
Howdy! This is another chapter in my series about software testing. You don't have to have read any of the previous installments to understand this article, but " An Introduction to Testing the Impossible " covers some similar concepts and tools. Today we are going to cover another advanced testing technique called Model-Based Testing that can help us find exotic bugs very quickly without a lot of…
"What is the difference between a class and a struct in C#?". I like this as a lead-in interview question because most candidates can offer up a quick answer that can help them get some confidence rolling in case they are nervous (we are not generally looking to asses candidates for performance under duress 🙂). There is a spectrum of correct answers that can shed light on how the candidate thinks…
This post is a beginner's walk through of how to use Dafny to build formally verified software. It is written for at a junior or beginner developer level and should be approachable by anyone with a little experience in C#, Java, Javascript or other similar languages. If you are not familiar with Formal Methods or the Dafny Verification Language see my previous article for an introduction. You…
A few days ago I was having dinner with some close friends and the discussion drifted to the nature of humanity. My friend argued that the measure of humanity was a sliding scale that was weighted against the amount of survival pressure that a person is under. Further, that survival pressure is primary driver of altruistic expression. Essentially that when the chips are down, our mental risk…
Hey, if you like this article be sure to check out the follow up " Getting started with Dafny: Your first proof " I have a little joke that I tell to each new employee that I meet: "Hey I work on <Component X>, I'm sorry in advance for all the bugs you'll have to deal with 😅". I tell it to new QA, support folks and even sales people. It always gets a chuckle and is a good ice breaker. (Did I…
So, last time we covered the control plane of this platform and some of the nifty things that Microsoft Orleans provides for us that make it a great choice for this kind of platform. Today, we will cove the data plane, which includes routing and execution. But first a quick refresher. What are we building again? A basic serverless platform suitable for internal/private deployments. The goal is to…
Ok, ok. It took me 2 days. But I was doing other things with my life 🤷. But anyway, onto the real story. So a few days ago, I was writing some internal documentation for my job at Ziosk (did I mention we are hiring ?), specifically I was writing a primer for newcomers to Microsoft Orleans. To start with, Orleans is Microsoft's implementation of the Distributed Virtual Actor model, which makes…
I just finished my 2nd reading of “There is no Antimemetics division” by qntm. It is a short but wild novel that centers around the concept of creatures that the human mind cannot perceive and a group of intrepid protagonists that must use deduction and raw intelligence to notice gaps in their reality where they have encountered these creatures. The book explores a very thought-provoking concept:…
Can you believe it, there is just a week left in 2021! Although it's been a tough year for a lot of reasons, 2021 has been a great year for learning new concepts and ideas. Here are 5 of my favorite research papers that I got to read this year! #5 : " Critical Evaluation of Existing External Sorting Methods... " 2015, Martin Krulis, Charles University 🇨🇿 Ever needed to process a set of data that…