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An Unbelievable Demo

brendangregg.com

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Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#371

Post by deanCommie »

derefr wrote: post #288
toddmatthews wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep. i remember asking a question on google groups about some AppEngine query early on a Saturday morning thinking, "this will never be answered". about 15 minutes later Guido van Rossum answered my question.

Also, people who say so-and-so company (usually Google) is hard to contact for support, or that they require expensive support contracts before they'll talk to you, have likely never tried sending email to the appropriate mailing list for the product. It's amazing how often doing this completely bypasses any corporate first-line-support structure in the way, and just puts the email right into the inbox of the line en…

It's a great concept in theory, but in practice...find me the email list for Google Photos. Or Google Keep. These are two Google products that I use daily (including paying for one!)

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#372

Post by anthk »

mpermar wrote: post #160
peterkelly wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says the story was from 2005. Open source was very much widely known at that time. Linux was 13 years old by then, and Sun themselves open sourced both DTrace and Solaris that same year.

Widely known... by a few techies. Well, certainly many more than in 1995, right? But can't compare those times to these days.

You must be young. Everyone on IT/CS related knew about Linux/BSD and the GPL2/BSD licenses.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#373

Post by Aperocky »

brendangregg wrote: post #96
sydthrowaway wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sun was the number one employer in town in Australia? What?!

Sorry, should have said "tech" employer, and this is referring to Sun and its ecosystem. A few years earlier I gave a talk to a local University about the job market and asked the comp sci students to have a showing of hands as to whether they thought they'd work on Windows or Solaris when they graduated. Most hands went for Windows. Then I showed the local job statistics: Sun Solaris was number one.

A few years earlier?

I thought Solaris is being completely eclipsed by Linux.

Even windows are surprising because hardly anything except gaming and limited local clients are windows. Granted some people choose to develop on Windows.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#374

Post by gowld »

derefr wrote: post #346
rantwasp wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no. there is a big difference between having support and having someone that is passionate about something helping you out. support should be there and should be available from the simplest issues to the most complicated things about A PRODUCT. you will not get much traction if you ask the same things to the people expert person on a mailing list.

I guess I've never needed "support" in that sense. I almost always solve problems with the products/services we use myself — up to and including forking the vendor's codebase to fix their shit for them — because it's almost always the fastest way to do things. I've already been working with their product for a while, and I already know exactly what my own problem is. Provided I also know the language their code is wr…

> forking the vendor's codebase to fix their shit for them

How well does that work for a hosted cloud service?

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#375

Post by gowld »

cperciva wrote: post #345
yuppiemephisto wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with that phrasing. A lot of people on that thread seemed sure cperciva was some arrogant dickhead bound for failure, but tarsnap is going a lot stronger than many of them are. Also people in the thread were amazingly rude to him, while he seemed pretty polite to me.

I think you're giving cperciva too much credit. He was just as arrogant as people thought, and he was definitely defensive.

But does he refer to himself in the third-person? That's the pinnacle of arrogance.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#376

Post by gowld »

cperciva wrote: post #49

Reminds me of when Apple started providing "smaller size updates" to OS X. I was curious about the details since my doctorate had touched on the topic, so I worked my contacts (I had a few in Apple engineering from the FreeBSD / OS X relationship) and after a few months I got back as answer: "We're using a tool called bsdiff, are you familiar with it?" I was indeed, since I was the author of said tool. (Just to be cl…

Nowadays, Apple ships the whole 4GB OS, even when they have to ship 3 point updates in one month for small bugs.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#377

Post by gowld »

kuroguro wrote: post #207

A colleague of mine was attending a local tech conference just before Covid hit. I believe it was aimed at newcomers and various companies tried to show off exciting tech that interns/new coders could potentially work on. She couldn't believe what she saw. A major govt. backed logging company (which does do a lot of dev work themselves) were showing off one of our projects as theirs! We were using depth cameras to es…

Does logging software have extensive logging?

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#378

Post by tapotatonumber9 »

eppsilon wrote: post #350
layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>DTrace uses a minimalistic C dialect called D Which is completely unrelated to the other language called D, also known as DLang. (which was released 4 years earlier than DTrace by the way)

Should've called it C--.

Or, if less is more, perhaps “C-+”?

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#379

Post by gowld »

eppsilon wrote: post #350
layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>DTrace uses a minimalistic C dialect called D Which is completely unrelated to the other language called D, also known as DLang. (which was released 4 years earlier than DTrace by the way)

Should've called it C--.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C--

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#380

Post by SiempreViernes »

duxup wrote: post #322
Twirrim wrote: post #89

Years ago, I interviewed a candidate for a role on my team. As usual, one of the ways I break the ice with candidates is to get them to talk "war stories". The team he'd worked on had produced a tool that was only ever intended to be used by the team to solve a particular problem they had. It contained proprietary code. Unknown to the team, word had spread about the tool, and others had started to use it, including s…

I worked in support and came up with a quick script to check for a very specific issue. It was super simple and really just applied to one customer to find one bug they encountered. It really didn't do much more than look through a bunch of counters and a bunch of if statements ... Next thing I knew someone had copied it and started running as a rule on every data set / customer they could get their hands on, and of…

That was a very valuable anecdote, thank you!
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