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Resources for Getting Started with Distributed Systems

 I’m often asked how to get started with Distributed Systems, so this post documents my path and some of the resources I found most helpful.  It is by no means meant to be an exhaustive list. It is worth noting that I am not classically trained in Distributed Systems.  I am mostly self taught via independent study and on the job experience.  I do have a B.S. in Computer Science from Cornell, but focused mostly on graphics and security in my specialization classes.  My love of Distributed Systems and education in it came once I entered industry.  The moral of this story is that understanding distributed systems doesn’t require academic…

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2016: A Year in Review

 2016 was a year of constant movement, I visited 19 cities, in 7 countries, on 3 continents.  In the middle of the year I switched teams inside of Twitter and began working on a new challenge, Distributed Build.  I also spoke 15 times at conferences and meetups.  Its been a really long, wonderful and exhausting…

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A Quick Guide to Testing in Golang

 When I started writing Go in May, I found a lot of useful documentation on Getting Started with Go.  However, I found recommendations on testing best practices lacking.  So I decided to write down what I pieced together, and create a Github Repo of a base project with examples.  Essentially this is the guide I…

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2015: A Year in Review

 2015 has been a whirlwind of a year, which started off in a new city, with a new job as the Tech Lead of  Observability at Twitter.  The year was full of travel spanning 10 states, 3 different countries, and 2 continents.  This year I also had numerous opportunities to share my experiences with programming…

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Clarifying Orleans Messaging Guarantees

 There has been some confusion around Orleans messaging guarantees, that I wanted to take a second to clarify.  In past talks on Halo 4 and Orleans I mistakenly mention that Orleans supports At Least Once Messaging Guarantees.  However this is not the default mode.  By default Orleans delivers messages At Most Once. Its also worth pointing out that the paper…

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Orleans Preview & Halo 4

 On Wednesday at Build 2014 Microsoft announced the preview release of Orleans.  Orleans is a runtime and programming model for building distributed systems, based on the actor model.  It was created by the eXtreme computing group inside Microsoft Research, and was first deployed into production by 343 Industries (my team!) as a core component of the…

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Light Hoodie

 A few weeks ago Hoop Somuah and I decided that since the Seahawks were going to the Super Bowl we needed proper attire, so we decided to show our 12th man pride by creating custom Light Hoodies. We ordered NeoPixel Strands, a Trinket Arduino board, a capacitor, and a battery pack from Adafruit, and set out to…

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Node Summit 2013 Retrospective

 This year I attended Node Summit 2013 from December 3rd-4th in San Francsico.  I went to support Michael Shim, an HBO coworker who was speaking on a panel about Node.js in the Digital Media Universe, and to get a crash course into the culture, tech, and community surrounding this framework.  Being brand new to Node.js…

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