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Another fantastic set of observations by Jack. Sometime in 2004 in his office in Upson Hall, Ken Birman explained the elegance of virtual synchrony to me in very similar terms. When there are no failures, your group is humming along; then something fails and borks the group; and

[blog post] a post on managing 0-to-1 projects (from someone who has never managed anything), involving a cast of skunks, pigs, chicken, and other corporate fauna. maheshb.net/blog/2025/02/0…

This is the greatest write-up about the cat-herding that are corporate research projects.

Something that’s lost in “do we really need another new system?” debates is that the building muscle of an org atrophies if you stop rewriting systems from scratch. (and when you really need to build something new, you no longer have the culture / expertise for 0 to 1 efforts).

I updated my How to Disaggregate a Log Replication Protocol to include "separating ordering from IO". Basically I couldn't ignore CORFU as a way of separating responsibilities! So now we have A-F of ways of breaking apart the monolith. jack-vanlightly.com/blog/2025/2/10…

Whenever I get overwhelmed by a complex system, I remind myself that it’s sometimes good to be just a little bit dumb / lazy. Instead of “How does this thing work?”, the systems way is to ask: “Can I find a way to ignore how this thing works?”

[new blog post] Entrepreneurs think and act differently from managers and strategists. Some people are born entrepreneurs. Maybe you can teach it. Maybe you can't. But some minds thrive in uncertainty and make it up as they go. Others crave a plan, a map, a well-paved road.

As you may know, I have significant disagreements with Uncle Bob Martin about the software design advice in his book "Clean Code". He and I recently discussed some of these issues, and a transcript of the discussion is available at github.com/johnousterhout….

If you are looking for formal models of a real-world distributed system, DeepSeek DeepSeek released P specifications for their new distributed file system (3FS): github.com/deepseek-ai/3F…

CRAQ (by Mike Freedman and jeff terrace) is an elegant extension of chain replication (by robbert van renesse and fred schneider, two giants of distributed systems); nice to see it show up in the DeepSeek stack!

“nightmare bicycle” is a great name for a failure mode that happens all the time in software interfaces.

System design has a core tenet that “complex things can be made simple with abstraction”. To a non-systems person, the complexity seems unavoidable, so often they just want you to get on with the job of shoveling the crap, instead of studying it contemplatively.

in system design, nothing is more important than establishing a starting vocabulary for describing the problem and space of solutions (echoing wittgenstein: "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world").

I wonder when we’ll start seeing “vibe-design”

I have never seen it expressed exactly like that, but I wholeheartedly endorse it: Feedback beats planning. My plea at Meta was “No grand plans, follow the gradient of user value”.

You can just do things.

Honestly I feel like we're currently in a bit of CS dark ages where all our mental energy goes into working around shit design decisions of third party software. Total fucking waste of time.

[new blog post] On the two types of 10x engineers: I entirely blame Murat Demirbas (Distributolog) for encouraging me to write this up. maheshb.net/blog/2025/04/2…

I would highly recommend reading this article. It talks about two types of 10x engineers. For managers it’s important to identify these engineers and appreciate them for who they are and also as engineers its important to know what you want to be and enjoy doing. Ferrari or a