50 Years of the KIM-1

Supposedly the KIM-1 is 50 years old. Nobody seems to know the exact date it first shipped, but “January 1976” is the consensus so today seems as good a day as any.What’s a KIM-1 I hear some of you ask? Well history is strange stuff, written by the...

Everything’s a bug (or an issue)

What if I were to tell you that I had discovered a way to run software projects that’s efficient, effective, reliable, even pleasant? “Please continue…”, I hope you say. Up front I’ll let you know this isn’t a new discovery. In fact...

Congestion Collapse in Distributed Systems

I noticed this talk by my former colleague (at Netscape and AOL) Jim Roskind, who now works at Amazon.com. He gives a great introduction to the phenomenon of congestion collapse in complex queueing systems. His examples include familiar scenarios such as busy...