Is it Possible to Write Bug-Free Code? A Case for Thorough Specifications
When I started as a server developer at Vena in 2013, we didn't have test-driven development. Sure, we designed our codebase to be testable by using »
More agile than you think
This topic has been on my mind for a while, and I wanted to share my thoughts because it taught me very important things. Roughly a »
What's using all the disk space?
We had an issue a while ago where one of our Mongo instances had run out of available space on the root disk. This was concerning »
Life After Big IT
There’s a story I tell candidates during their interviews, that embodies the spirit of Vena. Shortly after I left a big IT firm to join »
So, Patrick, how was your long weekend?
I took this past Monday as a vacation day. Upon returning, I sent this email to the team, and they suggested I post it here. Upon »
Help! I invented an algorithm and I don't know how it works
This past weekend, I needed to find a good fraction to approximate a given value. Along the way, I learned about continued fractions, and emerged with »
Three Month Anniversary
It was the morning of Test Friday and I had just witnessed an accident at Dundas and Bloor. “This is a great sign,” I said under »
The Case for a Logarithmic Performance Metric
Traditional comparisons of benchmark results focus on percentage differences. While seemingly simple to understand and compute, such comparisons pose a number of problems that are solved »
Measuring information in millibytes
A thousandth of one byte. Does such a thing even exist? Yep, it does. I've used them before. How to debug an optimizing compiler Suppose you »
Fun with DNS
At Vena we've been recently engaged in an effort to upgrade our servers to take advantage of AWS's Autoscaling and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) services, the »