Commentary on comments
Mar 12, 2024
in •
BASIC
basic
programming interface
code
comments
program
programming
reading
3 min read
At my first programming class at the university, the instructor handed out two sheets for us to write the program text in BASIC. On the board, he wrote the assignment: “Create a program to input and calculate the average of 10 bowling scores.” Then the teacher left the room. Is this task difficult? I don’t remember my solution, but it seems there was a FOR/NEXT loop and no more than 15 lines of code.
In each form for the program code, we would write the code by hand before entering it into the computer – it was about 70 lines. I had no idea why the teacher gave us two forms each. Since my handwriting has always been terrible, I used the second form to neatly rewrite my code, hoping to earn a couple of points for style.
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➦ The performance of an application is determined by its architecture
Mar 07, 2024
application
performance
architecture
product
fine-tuning
2 min read
The performance of an application is determined by its architecture. At first glance, it seems that this statement should be obvious, but real-world experience shows otherwise. For example, software architects often believe that application performance issues can be resolved simply by switching to software infrastructure from another vendor. The source of this belief may be the advertising hype surrounding testing results – for example, it is claimed that the leading company’s product outperforms the nearest competitor by a certain percentage. However, if the leading product performs an operation in 3 milliseconds, while the competing product does it in 4 milliseconds, the claimed percentage (one millisecond) means very little against the backdrop of overall low performance rooted in architectural inefficiency.
Besides IT managers and performance testing teams, there are and other groups of people, such as the support service of the development company and authors of books on application performance management, which they recommend fine-tuning the application infrastructure: play with memory allocation operations, connection pool sizes, the sizes of thread pools and so on.
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➦ A verbose journal will deprive you of sleep
Mar 05, 2024
system
log
error
systems
operation
2 min read
When I encounter a system that has been in development or operation for a long time, the first sign of real trouble is always a “dirty” log. You know what I’m talking about: it’s when clicking a link during normal web page usage results in a whole stream of messages being recorded in the system’s single log. Too many log entries can be just as useless as having none at all.
If your systems are similar to mine, then when your work ends, the work of others begins. After the development is completed, the system will be long and successfully serve customers (if you’re lucky). How will you learn about problems if the system is in operation, and what will you do about them?
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