Beyond Efficiency by Dave Ackley

About this episode

In this episode, the hosts discuss Dave Ackley's paper 'Beyond Efficiency' and challenge conventional software engineering practices.

Dave Ackley 's paper Beyond Efficiency is three pages long. With just these three pages, he mounts a compelling argument against the conventional way we engineer software. Instead of inflexibly insisting upon correctness, maybe allow a lil slop? Instead of chasing peak performance with cache and clever tricks, maybe measure many times before you cut. So in this episode, we're putting every CEO in the guillotine… (oh, that stands for "correctness and efficiency only", don't put us on a list)… and considering when, where, and how to do the robust thing. Links $ patreon.com/futureofcoding — The most recent bonus episode is a discussion with Stefan Lesser about new "laws of physics" we can invent inside the computer. Don't destroy the earth, then make sure your thing can't be destroyed, then don't destroy your data, and finally, do your damn job, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. A Software Epiphany , and the accompanying HN discussion — giga viral, so sick PartyKit ? Nice! What started as a simple todo list turned into an ocean of tech boy milk and, ultimately, the AI apocalypse . Jepsen is a rough, rugged, deeply thoughtful and fantastically cool approach to distributed systems testing…

People in this episode

Hosts: Ivan Reese, Jimmy Miller, Lu Wilson

Guest: Dave Ackley

Topics covered

• software engineering
• efficiency
• robustness
• performance
• distributed systems
• technical interviews

Keywords

• software engineering
• efficiency
• robustness
• performance
• distributed systems
• technical interviews
• cache
• Byzantine fault
• CAP theorem

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: patreon.com, PartyKit, Jepsen

Books & works: Beyond Efficiency, A Software Epiphany, FoundationDB

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