Finds from the Web July 2023-07-18
Some things I've found during this month worth sharing.
Lectures
Origins of Precision by Machine Thinking How to build up precision when on a deserted island? A fantastic short tour of how to gradually build up the techniques and tools necessary for high-precision machining.
SimTigerBeetle by Joran Dirk Greef A look into how TigerBeetle -- a distributed financial transaction database -- does deterministic simulation of a distributed cluster with client requests and injected faults both in storage and network. A good example of how determinism and decoupling of non-deterministic inputs can make things easier to verify and simulate. Another interesting example is this GDC talk on Testing in Retro City Rampage.
Making Systems Programming Accessible by Andrew Kelley Lowering the barrier to understanding a system is very beneficial and spending the time to learn techniques, tools and ways to write and structure systems so that you have good accessibility to look into them is well worth the time. In the talk, testing, simulation, debugging, profiling and fast edit/compile/test iteration cycles are brought up as good tools to have easy access to help a developer increase accessibility into the system. The talk itself is friendly and accessible. I'd also add to this, that in larger projects, investing in bespoke tools that allow quick and easy testing as well as inspection of system state also increases accessibility. SimTigerBeetle is one such example.