Links to some of my favorite articles

2023

• Making Python 100x faster with less than 100 lines of Rust

• Rewriting the Ruby parser

• Building a baseline JIT for Lua automatically

2022

• Building the fastest Lua interpreter.. automatically!

• Building a custom code search index in Go for searchcode.com

• DNS Esoterica - Why you can’t dig Switzerland

• Seeing through hardware counters: a journey to threefold performance increase

• Contributing os.scandir() to Python

2021

• Abusing AWS Lambda to make an Aussie Search Engine

• Rebuilding the spellchecker (series)

• 700,000 lines of code, 20 years, and one developer: How Dwarf Fortress is built

• Making the world’s fastest analytics even faster

• We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200+ vacant apartments

2020

• A Pipeline Made of Airbags

• ClickHouse Cost-Efficiency in Action: Analyzing 500 Billion Rows on an Intel NUC

• Fast IPv4 to Host Lookups

• Intelligent DNS based load balancing at Dropbox

• TinyPilot: Build a KVM Over IP for Under $100

2019

• Geosharded Recommendations Part 1: Sharding Approach

• My favourite Git commit

2018

• How Ipdata Serves 25M API Calls From 10 Infinitely Scalable Global Endpoints For $150 A Month

• Farewell, Google Maps

• Finding my Dream Home with Isoline Routing

• Centrifuge: a reliable system for delivering billions of events per day

• The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company

• Serverless to the Max: Doing Big Things for Small Dollars with Cloudflare Workers and Azure Functions

2017

• Testing Huge PostgreSQL Backups for 37 Cents a Day

• Dodging S3 Downtime With Nginx and HAProxy

2016

• Self-Documented Makefile

• Parsing 10TB of Metadata, 26M Domain Names and 1.4M SSL Certs for $10 on AWS

2015

• Choose Boring Technology

2014

• Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster

• Data Warehouse and Analytics Infrastructure at Viki

• How to be an open source gardener

• Content search on a budget

2012

• Sharding & IDs at Instagram

• How to crawl a quarter billion webpages in 40 hours

• 20 lines of code that will beat A/B testing every time

• Why Averages Suck and Percentiles are Great

2011

• Storing hundreds of millions of simple key-value pairs in Redis

• Measure Anything, Measure Everything

2010

• Readme Driven Development

• Taco Bell Programming

2009

• The Git Parable

2006

• The Development Abstraction Layer

2003

• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

2001

• Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth

2000

• The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code

• Things You Should Never Do, Part I