Friday Blast #53
Notes on structure concurrency or go statement considered harmful (2018) - making the case that the go
statement (or async/await
or the equivalent functions from other languages) is just as good for concurrent programming as goto
was for the early programming of the 50s and 60s. Which is not that good. The idea of nurseries, which the author proposes does look nice, though without language support in the form of nicer syntax I don’t really see it catch on.
Scaling a high-traffic rate limiting stack with Redis cluster (2018) - A study of how Stripe improved their handling of rate limiting. Scary stuff that there was one single Redis machine doing all this (granted, with a bunch of secondaries). The discussion on “ambient” error rate is super as well - one of the big differences between small scale and large scale systems.
The tectonics of the web (2018) - Rundown of the IETF, W3C and ECMA - three standards organizations which more or less define what’s happening on the web and Internet to a larger extent.
The Web I want (2018) - less JS and more HTML&CSS. When it’s the case. I think the “think of all the places with bad internet”/”thing of the batteries” argument is the best to sway folks to keep things simple.
Developing real-time web applications with server-sent events (2018) - SSEs are a newish API for folks to use. They’re a specialization of the bidirectional communication that web sockets allow. Only the server is allowed to send data, in response to a client request. So they’re duals of the regular “request-response” approach which is the standard. The article does a thorough job of exploring them and the edge cases they have. Especially those around lost connections.