The Periodic Table of Realtime: A compendium for all things event-driven and related

Presenting the Ably Periodic Table of Realtime, an interactive resource for developers that are just starting out in the world of realtime or looking to upscale and enhance their event-driven skills.

How Google bought Android—according to folks in the room

By mid-2005, Android was acquired and the future looked bright. But just six months earlier, things weren’t quite as rosy. In January of that year, the startup was desperate for cash and their main task was the same as for most startups: getting funding. After the pivot from a camera OS to an open source phone platform, they still had the daunting task of actually building a product, which meant they’d need more money to hire a large enough team to do the work.

Service reliability math that every engineer should know

For a service to be up 99.99999% of the time, it can only be down at most 3 seconds every year. Unfortunately, achieving that milestone is a herculean task, even for the most experienced site reliability engineering teams.

B-Trees: More than I thought I'd want to know

Recently, I’ve been reading through the excellent Database Internals (Alex Petrov, 2019). The first half of the book is dedicated to the implementation of database storage engines – the subsystem(s) of a DBMS that handles long-term persistence of data. A surprising amount of this section discusses the implementation and optimization of various B-Tree data structures.

It's time to retire the CSV

If you’ve worked with data for any length of time, you’ve come across the Comma-Separated Values (CSV) format. Its simplicity and ubiquity make CSV an extremely popular way for organizations to exchange data both internally and externally. While many programs can’t read or write Excel spreadsheets, almost anything can read and write CSVs, and a human can open a CSV file in any text editor and understand roughly what it contains.

How writing can advance your career as a developer

In their first few years on the job, engineers spend roughly 30% of their workday writing, while engineers in middle management write for 50% to 70% of their day; those in senior management reportedly spend over 70% and as much as 95% of their day writing.