Example of how some of the new features in the C++ standard will work together.
A chip reverse engineering story with the best digressions. It's not just about figuring out that the supposed RAM chip is actually a touch tone dialtone generator; it's also figuring out the maths on every dialtone generator on the market to exactly identify this one. And then going into some semiconductor physics for good measure.
An introduction to Futamura projections, phrased in terms of physical objects rather than partial evaluation of source code.
> In practice, a message broker is a service that transforms network errors and machine failures into filled disks. Then you add more disks.
On why you probably want either a load balancer or a database, not a pubsub system.
Slava Pestov reads through The NeWS Book: An Introduction to the Network/Extensible Window System from 1989. I never knew anything about NeWS, except from the Unix Haters Handbook X11 rant, so it was nice to fill it in with some more facts.
> Specifically, what I needed was mostly like a tree diff but I wasn’t optimizing for the same thing as other algorithms, what I wanted to optimize for was resulting file size, including indentation.
Many people don't appreciate how complicated handling configuration data is in the real world. (Pretty much every one of my jobs has at some point turned into a configuration handling nightmare). This is a good story on exactly that. There's a need for a seemingly very simple config manipulation operation, but a couple of weeks later you find yourself doing dynamic programming.
(Also, this is not just a good story, but a great example on just how to present an algorithm).
A walk through early CPU branch prediction strategies.
How to make a practical web search system using bloom filters rather than an inverted index. I especially like the notes on how classical problems of signature-based don't really matter in this domain. E.g. a modest amount of false positives is not a problem, since the full result set needs to be scored no matter what. Or how sharding the index by number-of-unique-terms was impractical in the past due to excessive disk seeks, but no problem when the index needs to be sharded to hundreds of machines anyway.