Top all-time · #5947
Pat Helland
Personal blog · pathelland.substack.comsystemsdataprogramming
Pat Helland writes Scattered Thoughts on Distributed Systems, a personal blog at pathelland.substack.com about systems, data and programming. Since 2020, 13 different Hacker News readers have linked it 14 times, most often “Don’t Get Stuck in the “Con” Game”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Random ideas about distributed computing, databases, life as software engineer, and other irrelevant things. Click to read Scattered Thoughts on Distributed Systems, by Pat Helland, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.
Most-linked posts?
- Don’t Get Stuck in the “Con” Game3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-02-11
- If All You Have Is a Database, Everything Looks Like a Nail2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-11-24
- I Am So Glad I'm Uncoordinated – By Pat Helland2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-12-16
- Scattered Thoughts on Distributed Systems – Pat Helland2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-11-23
What Hacker News says?
I have many recommendations of different kinds: ## Blogs: - http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/ - https://bartoszsypytkowski.com/ - https://decentralizedthoughts.github.io/ - https://www.the-paper-trail.org/ - https://blog.acolyer.org/ - https://pathelland.substack.com/ ## Other web resources - https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/ - set of resources from Amazon about building distributed systems - https://www.yout…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Recommended books and papers on distributed systems?”Submitted If All You Have Is a Database, Everything Looks Like a Nail as a story · 178 points
HN discussionChain Replication (and friends) are vastly simpler than Paxos (and friends) in many ways, but do have the same requirement for determinism. That's because chain replicated systems typically need to be confluent (see https://pathelland.substack.com/p/dont-get-stuck-in-the-con-... ), which means that all the replicas need to have the same value in them when replication is done. Conceptually simpler, for sure, but many…
Comment linking /p/dont-get-stuck-in-the-con-game-v2
on “Consensus Is Harder Than It Looks (2020)”Submitted Autonomous Computing (short version) as a story · 20 points
HN discussionGoogle Spanner (and one other system I worked with) had this neat trick up its sleeve: Utilizing comparatively lighter witness replicas, that only participate in a quorums and keep a time-truncated (recent) un-materialized log necessary but answer no queries. Witnesses could, however, be used to bring other full nodes up-to-speed. This meant, availability of the cluster overall generally went up, assuming co-ordinat…
Comment linking /p/dont-get-stuck-in-the-con-game-v2
on “You Can’t Sacrifice Partition Tolerance (2010)”Submitted Fail Fast Is Failing Fast as a story · 4 points
HN discussion"normalize until it hurts, denormalize until it works" is evergreen advice for scaling both reads and writes. Enforcing (synchronously) referential integrity and other forms of normalized constraints is what gets expensive. Pat Helland has some really good writing on this stuff, e.g. https://pathelland.substack.com/p/i-am-so-glad-im-uncoordina...
Comment linking /p/i-am-so-glad-im-uncoordinated
on “Hitchhiker's Guide to Moving from Relational Data to Events”Submitted Don't Get Stuck in the Con Game (V3) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Acid: My Personal “C” Change as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Scattered Thoughts on Distributed Systems – Pat Helland as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted I Am So Glad I'm Uncoordinated – By Pat Helland as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Don’t Get Stuck in the “Con” Game as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Don't Get Stuck in the “Con” Game as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted If All You Have Is a Database, Everything Looks Like a Nail as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
