I’ve spent down the past week tracking down an absolutely brutal bug inside Akka.NET. Sometimes the CPU utilization of the system will randomly jump from 10% to 100% and stay pegged like that until the process is recycled. No exceptions were thrown and memory / network / disk usage...
The Profound Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem
I’m in the process of writing up a lengthy set of blog posts for MarkedUp about the work that went into developing MarkedUp In-app Marketing, our real-time marketing automation and messaging solution for Windows desktop applications (and eventually WP8, WinRT, iOS, Android, Web, etc…)
During the course of bringing...
Read More
Business to Business Services Are What Will Make Dogecoin Succeed
Following on from my previous post about the second / third generation cryptocurrencies advancing the start of the art, I’ve spent...
Read More
Bitcoin Paved the Way, but it’s Not the Future of Cryptocurrency
Until recently, I was extremely skeptical of cryptocurrency in general. In the midst of the investment speculation and mania in late 2013,...
Read More
The Taxonomy of Terrible Programmers
The MarkedUp Analytics team had some fun over the past couple of weeks sharing horror stories about software atrocities and the real-life inspirations for the things you read on The Daily WTF. In particular, we talked about bad apples who joined our development teams over the years and...
Read More
Win32 Errors: How to Format GetLastError() Output into Readable Strings
I’ve been doing a moderate amount of native Win32 C++ programming over the past few weeks, and occasionally I’ve needed to set up some debug points to print errors that occur during file and memory I/O.
When something goes wrong inside the Win32 API, some methods will return a...
Read More
You Succeed Once You Stop Giving a Shit
This post is about how to find success in any situation and draws entirely from my own experiences. Your mileage may vary.
July was a rough month for me this year – I endured simultaneous failure on all fronts. I had put on a shitload of weight, ended...
Read More
Being Right is Always the Wrong Choice
It was about four or five years ago that I had an intrinsic need to be “right” all the time.
I couldn’t let it go when someone made a mistake, or slighted me, or disputed the quality / direction of my work. Everyone else was wrong. I wasn’t alone in...
Read More
Instant File Server: turn any directory into a webserver with a simple command
Our engineering team has been neck-deep in configuration hell lately. Editing 2000-line Solr configuration files, trying to get Apache Oozie integrated into DataStax Enterprise, Cassandra 1.2 upgrades, and more – and the one thing in common with all of these tasks is the prevalence of enormous XML configuration files.
Having...
Read More
Cassandra Summit Talk: Real Time Analytics with Cassandra, Hive, and Solr
I spoke at the Cassandra Summit this year about how we use Cassandra, Hive, and Solr in production at MarkedUp Analytics.
Planet Cassandra recently made all of the videos and slides available and I thought I would share. Enjoy!