Last time around, I looked at the tragedy of the commons as it relates to server resources. Today, I want to introduce two patterns for optimal resource utilization given different sets of actors with independent goals. The Microservice Solution Concept The first use pattern is the easier one: remove the contention by having independent teams…
Marketplaces In Computing, Part 1
I tend to see resource over-subscription problems frequently at work. We have a set of product teams, and each team has a manager, a product owner, and a set of employees. These teams share computing resources, though: they use the same servers, access the same databases, and use the same networks. This leads to a…
The Marginal DBA
You Have A Performance Problem; What Do You Do? Brent Ozar had a blog post about what hardware you can purchase with the price of two cores of Enterprise Edition and argues that you should probably spend some more money on hardware. Gianluca Sartori has a blog post along similar lines. By contrast, Andre Kamman had an entire…
The economy — stupid or not?
Fivethirtyeight has an excellent breakdown of the State of the Union address and what it actually means. tl;dr -- the economy is better off than mainstream Republicans claim but not as good as the Democrats claim. We're just about to pre-recession levels in a lot of areas. The flip side of the coin is "How…
100% of the people reading this post are reading this post (and other lies about statistics)
A friend recently shared an article about the Ice Bucket Challenge that claimed only 27% of the money raised is going towards research. Here's the article. Here's the headline: ICE BUCKET CHALLENGE: ALS FOUNDATION ADMITS LESS THAN 27% OF DONATIONS FUND RESEARCH & CURES$95 Million Later: Only 27% Of Donations Actually Help ‘Research The Cure’I was pretty…
Elon Musk: World’s greatest pro wrestler? Or greatest human being?
Sadly, he is not a pro wrestler. But he is the CEO of Tesla Motors, and he just did something so awesome that he may qualify for greatest human being in the world. Let's set the brilliant title of his post aside for a moment. (Okay, giggle for a moment or two at the title.) Tesla…
Sorry, Mike Trout: should have gotten an economics degree
Regression is quickly becoming the most interesting site in the Deadspin network (if the least funny). A recent article actually quantifies a superstar General Manager as more valuable than the best player in the game. You can get his actual paper here. I've skimmed the paper -- the writing itself could use some improvements, I would…
Contra Penguatroll: The Spike In Tuition
This started out as a comment on yesterday's blog post, but I've been terrible lately about posting, so I'm turning this into a full-blown post. Reasons for tuition going up: 1) Greater demand. Tony is spot-on here; when American culture has gotten to the point where you _must_ go to a four-year university to "find yourself"…
The first (and possibly last) upbeat economic post on this blog
With all the gloom and doom about the US economy, it's important to note one thing: we're still better than Europe. (Suck it, Europe! I did enjoy Final Countdown, however.) Very pleased to see the relative decline in government spending, in particular.
Wage Suppression
Steve Sailer has been posting a lot lately about wage suppression, especially in software development and tech recruiters. The special agreement hiring policy doesn't quite say what Sailer's saying, though---the collusion involves managers, not engineers. On the other side of things, where I think Sailer's argument is much stronger, we're getting our annual "We've got to…
36 Chambers - The Legendary Journeys: Execution to the max! 