In last week’s piece on “ Building Your First OpenJDK ,” we explored how to set up a development environment for hacking on the JVM and completing a build. Today, we’re going to take the next step: diving deep into the source and adding a feature. Note that this adventure and the resulting patch are offered as an illustration of how HotSpot and the JDK’s memory management components fit…
It’s common to think of runtimes and VMs as black boxes that execute app code and stay behind the scenes. But sometimes understanding a program’s performance characteristics requires leaving handwavy statements like “the JIT will probably optimize that out” behind and doing the hard work: digging deeper. One of the most powerful steps a programmer can take toward…
El on Flickr.
Dolores Park on Flickr. Dolores Park
It’s been a few years since I’ve been part of Instrument, but I couldn’t be prouder of my friends and colleagues at the studio. Some phenomenal digital craft handmade in Portland, Oregon. helloinstrument : We get to craft a lot of nice UX here at Instrument, but it’s difficult to show, since a lot of it is touchscreen, iPad, or interactive kiosk work out in the real world. So we made this reel to…
After the neologism “NoOps” made its way around the web to much ridicule this week, Lucas at AppFog took a stab at reclaiming the term following its rejection by developers and operations teams alike. I originally posted this as a comment on a link aggregator , but the original post has been deleted so I’ve moved it here to give it a home. The original comment follows: It is…
Home From Afar on Flickr. Home From Afar
Sausalito on Flickr. Sausalito
(Taken with picplz .)
I don’t often make it to conferences, but occasionally submit a talk or two on ideas that have guided (and emerged from) my thought, research, and work over the past year. Here’s the second for 2012: Faced with unprecedented growth and equally demanding calls for reliability and predictability, we as engineers find ourselves called to develop stable distributed applications with solid scalability…
Somewhere in Northern California (Taken with picplz .)
“It was a subtle change, but a profound one nonetheless. The fundamental units of my writing had mutated under the spell of the word processor: I had begun by working with blocks of complete sentences, but by the end I was thinking in smaller blocks, in units of discrete phrases. This, of course, had an enormous effect on the types of sentences I ended up writing. The computer had not only made it…
“The importance of this habit of mine for our purposes lies in the simple aphorism that software produces subjects . When we engage with symbolic structures of sufficient complexity, to an extent we synchronize our own internal symbology of those structures. In this we are carrying out our own programs as social beings.” - Allucquere Rosanne Stone in The War of Desire and Technology at the close…
I don’t often make it to conferences, but occasionally submit a talk or two on ideas that have guided (and emerged from) my thought, research, and work over the past year. Here’s the first for 2012: As patterns in webops infrastructure evolve into increasingly interdependent networks of distributed applications, the process of illuminating and responding to failures and abnormalities…
(Taken with picplz at Serpentine in San Francisco, CA .)
Pier 3 (Taken with picplz .)
(Taken with picplz .)
Chicago (Taken with picplz .)
Gary (Taken with picplz .)