Learning Labs

You can only pick two: Consistency, Availability, or Partition Tolerance. Choose wisely.

Stop calling failing services before they take down your entire system.

The difference between a 5ms query and a 5-second query that crashes your app.

Why loading 10 blog posts triggers 100 database queries and destroys performance.

Stop attackers from bankrupting your API bill and crashing your servers.

The fundamental relationship between queue length, arrival rate, and wait time.

Retries can create problems, see how systems prevent it.

Every piece of knowledge should have a single, unambiguous representation.

All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

The simplest explanation is usually correct.

Don't implement features until you actually need them.

Interrupted work takes significantly longer than uninterrupted work.

Beyond a certain threshold, working more hours decreases productivity.

Why 80% of outcomes come from 20% of inputs—and how to leverage this for massive productivity gains.

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Organizations design systems that mirror their communication structure.

People rise to their level of incompetence.

The best way to get the right answer on the internet is to post the wrong answer.

Incompetent people overestimate their competence.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

In any dispute, the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.

Why throwing more CPUs at a problem doesn't give you proportional speedup.

The number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years.

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

90% of everything is crap.

Finding the longest common prefix string amongst an array of strings using different scanning approaches.

How constant time O(1) lookups actually work under the hood.

How network value really scales—not quadratically like you think.