Interesting Snippets from 2013-02-25

• Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods – Something Similar

  Below is a list of some lessons I’ve learned as a distributed systems engineer that are worth being told to a new engineer. Some are subtle, and some are surprising, but none are controversial. This list is for the new distributed systems engineer to guide their thinking about the field they are taking on. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s a good beginning. The worst characteristic of this list is that it focuses on technical problems with little discussion of social problems an engineer may run into. Since distributed systems require more machines and more capital, their engineers tend to work with more teams and larger organizations. The social stuff is usually the hardest part of any software developer’s job, and, perhaps, especially so with distributed systems development.

• Designs, Lessons and Advice from Building Large Distributed Systems

  Designs, Lessons and Advice from Building Large Distributed Systems

• You Can’t Sacrifice Partition Tolerance | codahale.com

  In 2000, Dr. Eric Brewer gave a keynote at the Proceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing1 in which he laid out his famous CAP Theorem: a shared-data system can have at most two of the three following properties: Consistency, Availability, and tolerance to network Partitions. In 2002, Gilbert and Lynch2 converted “Brewer’s conjecture” into a more formal definition with an informal proof.

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