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Speeding up this site by 50x

I’ve seen all these studies that show how a 100ms improvement in page load time has a significant effect on page views, conversion rate, etc., but...

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How often is the build broken?

I’ve noticed that builds are broken and tests fail a lot more often on open source projects than on “work” projects. I wasn’t sure how much...

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CLWB and PCOMMIT

The latest version of the Intel manual has a couple of new instructions for non-volatile storage, like SSDs. What’s that about? Before we look at the...

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Caches: LRU v. random

Once upon a time, my computer architecture professor mentioned that using a random eviction policy for caches really isn’t so bad. That random eviction isn’t bad...

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Testing v. informal reasoning

This is an off-the-cuff comment for Hacker School’s Paper of the Week Read Along series for Out of the Tar Pit. I find the idea itself,...

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Assembly v. intrinsics

Every once in a while, I hear how intrinsics have improved enough that it’s safe to use them for high performance code. That would be nice....

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Data-driven bug finding

I can’t remember the last time I went a whole day without running into a software bug. For weeks, I couldn’t invite anyone to Facebook events...

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Editing binaries

Editing binaries is a trick that comes in handy a few times a year. You don’t often need to, but when you do, there’s no alternative....

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That bogus gender gap article

Last week, Quartz published an article titled “There is no gender gap in tech salaries”. That resulted in linkbait copycat posts all over the internet, from...

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