A few years ago I used to do these bowl game picks, and two years in a row I ended up picking the bowl game winners with over 70% accuracy. I liked the idea that this level of accuracy was based on expertise, and not luck which is much more likely. Not wanting to jinx it I haven’t done it since. (In fact, somehow those blog posts didn’t even make the cut for the pages that got migrated to the new blog.) ... Read more

Along with my good friend Clint Goudie-Nice, I gave a presentation at OpenWest 2017 entitled “Scaling the Unscalable”. It details some of the things we’ve learned exploring scalability for Adobe Experience Manager. One of the items discussed in the presentation was the assertion that, when it comes to production systems, there is no such thing as a horizontally-scalable database. We arrived at this surprising conclusion as we evaluated some of the characteristics of high-scale databases. ... Read more

Not long ago I attended a conference at which there were two talks about the current state of AI. One was extremely optimistic about the state of AI today, and more or less told us that the big breakthroughs in AI were right around the corner. This person also happened to work in a division of a company focused around selling AI as a service. The other speaker was much less optimistic, essentially claiming that despite all the advances we’ve made in AI, the AI we are really hoping for is still very far away. ... Read more

I’ve come to the conclusion that the way we are handling queries in web applications is flawed. ... Read more

The fallacies of distributed computing are well known. I didn’t come up with them, but I’ll summarize them here: ... Read more