saquib mian

Test your system without caching, too

Sat, 13 May 2017 11:23:45 -0400

The most severe outages at Twitter were cache outages.

-Yao Yue (Engineer at Twitter)

This blog post is based on some of the ideas in Yao Yue’s talk at QConSF last year, which I had the opportunity to attend, and some of the discussions I’ve heard at work recently.

When we usually think about caching, we realize pretty quickly that cache invalidation is difficult to get right. You have to be careful to invalidate correctly, in the correct order, and avoid race conditions in cache PUTs. But we put a lot of effort into utilizing a cache because of the benefits it gives us: decreased load on our databases and a performance boost via super fast in-memory lookups. Indeed, caching is critical to a high performing service.

Using the TryGet pattern in C#

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 19:59:00 -0400

The TryGet pattern is a little gem scattered throughout C# APIs, but many developers might not notice it. The general signature looks like this:

bool TryGetSomething( SomeInput i, out Something s );

As you can tell from the signature, the method returns a bool and takes any number of input parameters, the last of which is always an output parameter. The name TryGetSomething implies that the method will attempt to get Something (given input i), but that getting it may fail.

Hello, World

Sat, 16 Apr 2016 13:16:09 -0400

I’m a software developer, and this blog will be about our craft. I think developers work hard to make beautiful things and I want us to share that experience among ourselves. I also wanted a place to organize my thoughts about the state of this industry. There are so many ways to solve the same problem, so let’s strive for excellence in everything we do.

I intend to write about a good number of things, but I will try to stay away from tutorials – there’re a lot of those out on the internet.

Read a book every two weeks for a year

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 19:59:29 -0500

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that members of Generation Y are largely ignorant but opinionated.

Don’t get me wrong, we know a lot about some things, like pop culture and how to harness social media. But I think we entertain a very superficial interest in what we know. We’re very comfortable with being aware of only whats relevant and not delving into an issue and really trying to understand its complicated nature. We’re an opinionated group, but we’re also deeply uninformed. In a world where national revolutions are being organized through social media, we’re also gravely disconnected.