How We Do Agile Hardware Development at Meld — In every sprint we built both hardware and software. This doesn’t mean we had a fully fabricated new board rev once a week. […] We couldn’t build a complete new board every week, and early on we didn’t even know for sure what parts we wanted in our final BOM (Bill of Materials) so we used eval boards. These stories of how companies iterated fast will eventually build a set of best practices for hardware startups, similar to those in software.
Recording Time Series — if data arrives with variable latency, timestamps are really probabilistic ranges. How do you store your data for searches and calculations that reflect reality, and are not erroneous because you’re ignoring a simplification you made to store the data more conveniently?
Call Me Maybe, ElasticSearch 1.5.0 — To be precise, Elasticsearch’s transaction log does not put your data safety first. It puts it anywhere from zero to five seconds later. In this test we kill random Elasticsearch processes with kill -9 and restart them. In a datastore like Zookeeper, Postgres, BerkeleyDB, SQLite, or MySQL, this is safe: transactions are written to the transaction log and fsynced before acknowledgement. In Mongo, the fsync flags ensure this property as well. In Elasticsearch, write acknowledgement takes place before the transaction is flushed to disk, which means you can lose up to five seconds of writes by default. In this particular run, ES lost about 10% of acknowledged writes.
FIDO — Netflix’s open source system for automatically analyzing security events and responding to security incidents.
