I dislike whitespace sensitive languages or definition formats with a passion. Especially when tabs and spaces are not treated equally. I don’t mind python as much nowadays but YAML is borderline insulting to me. I hope we all move on to something more sane soon.
GWS (Google Web Server). Powers websearch, responsible for rendering everything you see when you run a search. It used to have a Wikipedia page but basically everything on the Wikipedia page was wrong so the admins eventually deleted it (edit: apparently it's back. Basically everything on the wiki page is still wrong, but at least it doesn't claim GWS is an Apache derivative now). It's the oldest continually-pushed binary at Google (originally written 1999 by Craig Silverstein; at least when I left it still had code in it from Craig, Marissa Mayer, and Sergey Brin). It's changed programming languages twice (from C to C++ around 2005, and from C++ to Java etc. around 2010), and when I left was a frankenmonster of C++, Java, and two proprietary DSLs. My understanding is that it still exists, though most of my friends at Google have since moved on to other teams.
Thank you. Can you talk about the reasons that necessitated the rewrite from c++ to java? I didn’t realize Brin wrote any code that wasn’t python either.
I personally wasn't a big fan, I liked C++ (and Python - there was an embedded Python interpreter in 09-10 that was a casualty of the rewrite, and IMHO Python was a lot more productive than Java for experimentation).
There were some pragmatic reasons though. It's very difficult to multithread C++ correctly, while Java at least has a proper memory model and thread support (note that this was before C++11; at the time C++ had no standardized memory model at all). Debugging core dumps in production sucked. Most of the newer parts of the company (GMail, Docs, Google+, etc.) were written in Java, and the rewrite let us share code with them. Compile times sucked, and Java let us pluginize the architecture, load code at runtime, and build & push each component team's codebase independently (as well as shut them off independently if they started crashing).
Apologies for the blatant promotion attempt but you may want to check out our simple (in pretty much every sense) KMS implementation. https://github.com/phaistos-networks/KMS It’s inspired by vault and Google KMS and scales horizontally.
I am very much looking forward to forthcoming posts describing the actual architecture and specifics -- this is a great high-level overview, but I hope and expect they will expand on this expose soon.
I study codebases as a hobby. I highly recomend Seastar, Folly, Aeron and Disruptor, SQLite, PostgresSQL, LMDB, Tensorflow, Hashicorp’s vault, and the Linux Kernel projects as prime examples of high quality codebases.
Watch the Apple - Think Different commercial at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFEarBzelBs , and pay attention to the script/words. It's as if it was purpose-written for Rust.
In fact, there's even a callout to Result<> "..but the only thing you can't do, is ignore them" . :)
It was mostly sarcasm really — I thought the word play was fun:) kidding aside, I am intrigued by Rust. I am glad it gets the attention that it deserves.
I use Dropbox to store everything. There are no files that I care fore that are not managed by Dropbox (or iCloud, for my photos/videos). I use iA Writer to create lists and documents for everything in Dropbox folders. I also have a folder for PDFs/papers (also on Dropbox). There are also folders for my study nodes ( I study codebases ), notes on personal stuff, notes on Programming, on pretty much everything.
I use Spotlight (on macOS) to instantly locate what I need among the 100s of such files.
I ‘ve tried all kinds of ideas before settling for this setup, and they all felt forced or just too much trouble for what they were to me. Text files, Dropbox, and Spotlight have been a perfect combination for my needs for years now.
I do exactly the same thing. Nothing beats text files, a deep folder structure and full text search (and ubiquitous access via Dropbox). I get a ton of value out of my system.
The thing that I find really makes things click is to figure out/set up good keyboard shortcuts and then practice them, so that you are able to save files to anywhere in your organiser hierarchy very very quickly. Say an average of five seconds per file. They say a 10x quantitative change is a qualitative change; once I had this down, I started using it a ton more and treating it kind of like an extension of my memory.
For Mac users some useful starting points for this technique are Default Folder X and ClipMenu.
I try to do this but having a plain text editor built into their site would make it much more powerful for me. There are multiple times a day where I find myself on a system that I don't have my Dropbox files synced to.
Hmm I have a similar setup except I use gitlab private repo... but really there isn't that much of a need for a 'commit history' in notes... I think I'll try the dropbox approach.
