https://solivagant.dev/posts/ Recent content in Posts on Scratch Pad Hugo -- gohugo.io en Sun, 25 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://solivagant.dev/posts/feels/ Sun, 25 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://solivagant.dev/posts/feels/ <p>I worked at the same company for about ten years. While I ended up working on many different systems, there were a couple constants in the mix. It&rsquo;s remarkable how ingrained those codebases are in my head. Having started a new job, I miss the ability to quickly know <em>exactly</em> where in the code needs to change to support some new feature.</p> <p>This ability to navigate a codebase in your head feels to me very much like navigating the physical world. It feels almost like walking through callgraphs and directory structures. In a codebase I&rsquo;m very familiar with, I can plop myself down to exactly the right location and all paths from there are clear. In a new codebase, I often need to start from some few currently-known starting points and try to navigate from there, trying to discover my destination. I wonder if it&rsquo;s the same for others.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></p> <p>I worked at the same company for about ten years. While I ended up working on many different systems, there were a couple constants in the mix. It&rsquo;s remarkable how ingrained those codebases are in my head. Having started a new job, I miss the ability to quickly know <em>exactly</em> where in the code needs to change to support some new feature.</p> <p>This ability to navigate a codebase in your head feels to me very much like navigating the physical world. It feels almost like walking through callgraphs and directory structures. In a codebase I&rsquo;m very familiar with, I can plop myself down to exactly the right location and all paths from there are clear. In a new codebase, I often need to start from some few currently-known starting points and try to navigate from there, trying to discover my destination. I wonder if it&rsquo;s the same for others.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></p> <div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes"> <hr> <ol> <li id="fn:1"> <p>ChatGPT tells me that there has been some research here and thinking about code organization triggers the parietal lobe, which is also used for physical navigation. I don&rsquo;t feel like determining if this is a hallucination or fact, but it does align with my feeling.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> https://solivagant.dev/posts/converged/ Sun, 09 Mar 2025 10:33:06 -0400 https://solivagant.dev/posts/converged/ <p>A well known pattern for building systems is to break them down into <a href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-fault-isolation-boundaries/control-planes-and-data-planes.html">data planes and control planes</a>. Despite having known this and done this for years, I never considered this distinction within log replication protocols, another thing I&rsquo;ve thought about for years. The data plane of a log replication protocol can just be concerned with failure-free data redundancy (e.g. replication or erasure coding). The control plane is then concerned with handling and recovering from failures. Raft is a &lsquo;converged&rsquo; protocol mixing both data plane and control plane is one protocol and one log. But it doesn&rsquo;t have to be that way.</p> <p>A well known pattern for building systems is to break them down into <a href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-fault-isolation-boundaries/control-planes-and-data-planes.html">data planes and control planes</a>. Despite having known this and done this for years, I never considered this distinction within log replication protocols, another thing I&rsquo;ve thought about for years. The data plane of a log replication protocol can just be concerned with failure-free data redundancy (e.g. replication or erasure coding). The control plane is then concerned with handling and recovering from failures. Raft is a &lsquo;converged&rsquo; protocol mixing both data plane and control plane is one protocol and one log. But it doesn&rsquo;t have to be that way.</p> <p>I think this is a nice framework to think about the variety of log replication prtocols out there. Thanks to Jack Vanlightly for <a href="https://jack-vanlightly.com/blog/2025/2/6/steady-on-separating-failure-free-ordering-from-fault-tolerant-consensus">writing</a> about this. Check out his survey on the topic.</p>