Writing System Software [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Writing System Software [video]

#11

Post by minimaxir » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 4:59 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #10

In case you are interested in providing feedbacks about the next episodes, my current list of potential ideas is: 1. Code snippets: show small self contained functions from random places inside Redis. 2. Redis Sentinel: the first design, the immediate redesign of v2, and how it is internally implemented. 3. The use of goto in Redis. 4. Redis protocol parsing and zero-copying of objects. 5. The odd Redis persistence m…

> However I see that the reach of the videos is very low compared to a blog post

That's the reason why in my other comment, the data screencast I created was made in addition to a blog post, where the blog post and the video explicitly link to each other as cross-promotion.

That does extend production time significantly though.

Re: Writing System Software [video]

#12

Post by falcolas » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 5:02 PM UTC

Having watched similar series in the past, I would highly recommend some extra effort be put into the presentation - recording videos with no attention to lighting or sound makes it really hard to see and hear what's going on. Specifically for me, it's really hard to understand what's being said over the keyboard and reverb.

Some basic lighting (so your face isn't in shadows), a separate directional microphone (even a $40 snowball would help immensely), and potentially some sound baffling in the room would make a real difference to the video quality. Finally, dark colors with low contrasts encode quite poorly on YouTube; some of the code is rather hard to read.

I realize we're watching a software engineer and not an entertainer, but the payoff in the quality of the videos for relatively little effort and investment is remarkably big.

Re: Writing System Software [video]

#13

Post by xadoc » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 5:05 PM UTC

ak47surve wrote: post #8

copperx wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I missed the DHH series. Do you have a link? I haven't been able to find them.

You can find it here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5i1gdwe1Ls&list=PL3m89j0mV0... DHH's blogpost - https://m.signalvnoise.com/on-writing-software-well-aee37807...

The series moved to a channel called "Getting Real" where Jason Fried also publishes videos about design decisions.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdx5Dk3EWTe2i8YDA7bfl6g/vid...

Re: Writing System Software [video]

#14

Post by vvanders » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 5:20 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #10

In case you are interested in providing feedbacks about the next episodes, my current list of potential ideas is: 1. Code snippets: show small self contained functions from random places inside Redis. 2. Redis Sentinel: the first design, the immediate redesign of v2, and how it is internally implemented. 3. The use of goto in Redis. 4. Redis protocol parsing and zero-copying of objects. 5. The odd Redis persistence m…

One vote for #4, not sure how related it is to Redis but I always have fun showing how much snappier flatbuffers is vs protobuf because they don't need to allocate/copy/etc when reading data off the wire.

I feel like that knowledge needs to be shared around a bit more.

Re: Writing System Software [video]

#15

Post by CoolGuySteve » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 5:50 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #10

In case you are interested in providing feedbacks about the next episodes, my current list of potential ideas is: 1. Code snippets: show small self contained functions from random places inside Redis. 2. Redis Sentinel: the first design, the immediate redesign of v2, and how it is internally implemented. 3. The use of goto in Redis. 4. Redis protocol parsing and zero-copying of objects. 5. The odd Redis persistence m…

As an HFT systems programmer myself, 5, 10, 11 are interesting to me. As in, using Unix primitives to persist state in a distributed system.

It seems like there are really 2 meta topics: 1: Using C and the OS to maximize performance 2: building distributed systems

Re: Writing System Software [video]

#16

Post by randormie » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 5:52 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #10

In case you are interested in providing feedbacks about the next episodes, my current list of potential ideas is: 1. Code snippets: show small self contained functions from random places inside Redis. 2. Redis Sentinel: the first design, the immediate redesign of v2, and how it is internally implemented. 3. The use of goto in Redis. 4. Redis protocol parsing and zero-copying of objects. 5. The odd Redis persistence m…

One vote for #5. Also a general suggestion: these sessions could be livestreamed on twitch.tv for live interaction with viewers. Of course the VOD can still be uploaded to youtube later.

Re: Writing System Software [video]

#17

Post by stephen82 » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 5:56 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #10

In case you are interested in providing feedbacks about the next episodes, my current list of potential ideas is: 1. Code snippets: show small self contained functions from random places inside Redis. 2. Redis Sentinel: the first design, the immediate redesign of v2, and how it is internally implemented. 3. The use of goto in Redis. 4. Redis protocol parsing and zero-copying of objects. 5. The odd Redis persistence m…

How about writing a book with all these potential ideas and name it "The Design and Implementation of Redis in-memory Database"?

Re: Writing System Software [video]

#18

Post by bogomipz » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 5:57 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #10

In case you are interested in providing feedbacks about the next episodes, my current list of potential ideas is: 1. Code snippets: show small self contained functions from random places inside Redis. 2. Redis Sentinel: the first design, the immediate redesign of v2, and how it is internally implemented. 3. The use of goto in Redis. 4. Redis protocol parsing and zero-copying of objects. 5. The odd Redis persistence m…

I would be very interested in 2. I know some other folks who be as well. Cheers.

Re: Writing System Software [video]

#19

Post by xstartup » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 6:02 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #10

In case you are interested in providing feedbacks about the next episodes, my current list of potential ideas is: 1. Code snippets: show small self contained functions from random places inside Redis. 2. Redis Sentinel: the first design, the immediate redesign of v2, and how it is internally implemented. 3. The use of goto in Redis. 4. Redis protocol parsing and zero-copying of objects. 5. The odd Redis persistence m…

Please show me how Redis rebalances data when more shards are added.

Re: Writing System Software [video]

#20

Post by WJW » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 6:05 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #10

In case you are interested in providing feedbacks about the next episodes, my current list of potential ideas is: 1. Code snippets: show small self contained functions from random places inside Redis. 2. Redis Sentinel: the first design, the immediate redesign of v2, and how it is internally implemented. 3. The use of goto in Redis. 4. Redis protocol parsing and zero-copying of objects. 5. The odd Redis persistence m…

So cool! Redis is one of my favorite pieces of software and it's super interesting to see some of the internals explained more clearly. At the moment I'm only on the second episode, but I look forward to the rest of them. Perhaps replication could be a topic as well, if it's not already covered in the Sentinel and/or Cluster episodes. Another thing that would be interesting is how connections are handled and how concurrent commands from separate clients get executed in a sane way.

As an aside, I noticed several typos sneaked into comments here and there ('command gets replicated to the salves', etc). I'm half considering filing a pull request for them, but feel it might come across as overly pedantic. Would such a PR be appreciated?