RECENT ROTATIONS

Kafka and PubSub and Kinesis, oh my! Which eventing platform is best? In this post we’ll explore the three primary categories of eventing systems and understand their similarities, differences, and key use cases.

The data type choices we make when building data systems or metrics is critically important: as our systems run for long periods of time it can be easy to overflow the integers that we use (Y2K bug anyone?). As a result, I find myself …

Over the course of the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of interning at Rotational Labs as a technical writer. I’m excited to share a little bit about my experience and provide some insight from the perspective of someone who is …

As programmers, we tend think of ourselves as authors of code, but our daily engineering practice probably requires us to spend more time reading code than writing it. Perhaps this is even a source of stress for you. Changing your mindset …

gRPC is an effective way of implementing service-to-service APIs. However, there are limited tools available for mocking and testing gRPC services out of the box. One option is to set up a live test server, although this comes with its own …

With almost 30 billion connected devices, this isn’t Al Gore’s internet anymore. Consider this: According to Cisco’s Annual Internet Report, there will be 29.3 billion internet-connected devices in 2023, or more than three for every human. …

As a distributed systems company, we’ve had the privilege of speaking with dozens of vendors building crypto-adjacent solutions over the past few years. We’ve learned a lot along the way, especially about some of the key misconceptions that …

Customizing JSON serialization for your data types seems relatively straightforward on the surface, but it’s easy to get turned around in receiver, value, pointer, and indirection confusion. Many of the patterns and rules-of-thumb you …

Conflict-free replicated data types (or “CRDTs”) are inspiring the creation of more collaborative applications and improving the experience of users of distributed systems. In this post, we will explore how these data structures …

If you’re working in distributed systems, having a good terminal setup is pretty important! On MacOS iTerm2 is a popular choice. It has tabs, autocomplete, a built-in password manager and a fantastic screen splitting feature. If however …