I share interesting articles, videos, papers and more about distributed systems, formal methods and computer science.
Debugging concurrency bugs is no picnic, but we're going to get into it. Enter Fray, a deterministic concurrency testing framework from CMU’s PASTA Lab, that turns flaky failures into reliably reproducible ones.
To me it’s clear that the big idea there isn’t lightweight processes2 and message passing, but rather the generic components which in Erlang are called behaviours.
A curated collection of resources about deterministic simulation testing for distributed systems.
Emerging patterns for building scalable, high-performance observability pipelines
Material for the course Parallel, Concurrent and Distributed Programming by Ilya Sergey at Yale-NUS College
The challenge is that physical imperfections in hardware clocks (called quartz crystal oscillators) cause our software clocks to tick at different speeds, so that time passes faster or slower than it should, with these “drift” errors also accumulating into significant “skew” errors within a matter of minutes.
This page is a relatively informal discussion of distributed consensus and Paxos, what it does, how it works, and some tricks and variants.
The architecture of Restate, a Durable Execution engine built from the ground up.
