Category Archives: Architecture

Good concurrency changes the game

A long time before I seriously got into using distributed version control systems (DVCS) such as Bazaar and Git for developing software, it was already well known to me how the mechanics of these systems worked, and why people benefited … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Design, Go, Project, Snippet | 4 Comments

Death of goroutines under control

Certainly one of the reasons why many people are attracted to the Go language is its first-class concurrency aspects. Features like communication channels, lightweight processes (goroutines), and proper scheduling of these are not only native to the language but are … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Design, Erlang, Go, Project, Snippet, Test | 5 Comments

Ensemble, Go, and MongoDB at Canonical

About 1 year after development started in Ensemble, today the stars finally aligned just the right way (review queue mostly empty, no other pressing needs, etc) for me to start writing the specification about the repository system we’ve been jointly … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, C/C++, Cloud, Design, Go, PostgreSQL, Project, Python | 7 Comments

Efficient algorithm for expanding circular buffers

Circular buffers are based on an algorithm well known by any developer who’s got past the “Hello world!” days. They offer a number of key characteristics with wide applicability such as constant and efficient memory use, efficient FIFO semantics, etc. … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Article, C/C++, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, Snippet | 3 Comments

Vector clock support for Go

One more Go library oriented towards building distributed systems hot off the presses: govclock. This one offers full vector clock support for the Go language. Vector clocks allow recording and analyzing the inherent partial ordering of events in a distributed … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Cloud, Go, Project, Snippet | Leave a comment

Integrating Go with C: the ZooKeeper binding experience

ZooKeeper is a clever generic coordination server for distributed systems, and is one of the core softwares which facilitate the development of Ensemble (project for automagic IaaS deployments which we push at Canonical), so it was a natural choice to … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Article, C/C++, Go, Project, Snippet | 2 Comments

Removing seatbelts with the Go language for mmap support

Continuing the sequence of experiments I’ve been running with the Go language, I’ve just made available a tiny but useful new package: gommap. As one would imagine, this new package provides access to low-level memory mapping for files and devices, … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Go, Python, Snippet | 6 Comments

Interfaces and the design of software

A while ago Martin Pool made a very interesting post on the design of interfaces, inspired by a talk from Rusty Russel from 2003. Besides the interesting scale of interface quality explained there, this is a very insightful comment, often … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Article, Test | Leave a comment

Gocheck: A rich testing library for Go

It’s time to release my “side project” which has been evolving over the last several months: Gocheck. I’ve been watching Go for some time, and have been getting more and more interested in the language. My first attempt to write … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Go, Project, Test | 4 Comments

Integrating IRC with LDAP and two-way SMSing

A bit of history I don’t know exactly why, but I’ve always enjoyed IRC bots. Perhaps it’s the fact that it emulates a person in an easy-to-program way, or maybe it’s about having a flexible and shared “command line” tool, … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Cloud, Erlang, Mobile, Project, Python | 1 Comment