RECENT ROTATIONS

Protocol buffers are a method for serializing data to efficiently send between programs. The structure is reminiscent of XML or JSON, but unlike these more commonly used text-based serialization methods, protocol buffers are designed to …

Contexts are a critical part of services implemented in Golang. Although we see them often in server interfaces, they can be mysterious to developers implementing request handlers. In this post, we’ll discuss what contexts are and …

To say we are not at our most empowered when trying to communicate in an unfamiliar language is a bit of an understatement. As if the limitations of one’s own language weren’t bad enough, trying to get along in a different …

The most exciting applications coming out these days are the ones that aim big — aspiring to reach a global audience of users across regions, languages, timezones, and data centers. Not only are they in the exhilarating position of owning …

Good software development achieves complexity by describing the interactions of simple components. Of course, this is harder than it sounds, and if Mark Twain had been a software developer he would have likely said: “if I had more …

In this post, we’ll consider how it is that models trained on massive datasets using millions of parameters can be both “low bias” and also very biased, and begin to think through what we in the ML community might be able …

gRPC makes the specification and implementation of networked APIs a snap. But what is the simplest way to document a gRPC API? There seem to be some hosted providers by Google, e.g. SmartDocs, but I have yet to find a gRPC-specific tool. …

Right now only half the world is awake. For successful planetary-scale networking, it’s time for diurnal intelligently distributed systems.