Sam Bryan

I was interested in what someone from such a large website, eBay, would have to say about its architecture. There was a lot of takeaways from it, summarized in four main ideas: partition everything, use asynchrony everywhere, automate everything, and design the system keeping in mind that everything fails at some pint in a large distributed system. Although this is an older talk (from 2007), these all seem to be sound systems to design something so large. He referenced a theorem from 1998 that he said took a while to get traction. Likewise, I am sure his design principles have proven true for the last ten years. To be completely honest, there was a lot of industry-specific jargon used that went above my head. I took a lot of notes though, and looked up the terms I did not know. I still found it very interesting, though. I found it the most interesting that someone designing one of the largest websites in the world was incredibility realistic of the shortcomings of everything designed...

In this episode (number 219) of “Test Talks,” I was able to hear Shailesh Rao’s insight into having quality software. He compared it to a “paper-free office” or a “stress-free life,” both worthy goals, but are hard to achieve. They can be strived towards, but it is near impossible to get it 100%. He brought up the issues that bad software can pose to potentially millions of users. Bad software can open the doors to hackers, who might be able to take down websites like Twitter or Reddit. Also, it might stop airlines from being able to function — an annoyance to most, but Mr. Rao asked, “what if there was time-sensitive and lifesaving medicine onboard?” I found this podcast brought up some aspects that I had not thought of before when if comes to quality assurance. I suppose that I’ve thought about the various things he brought up, but as a consumer and never as a creator of the software. A very thought-provoking topic brought up was the fickleness of consumers. They don’t have the...

In computer science, there are a lot of things we would normally take for granted, but it might not be so easy to program. Take time, for instance. If we wanted to create an app to calculate how many seconds ago a time and date was, it seems straightforward. Of course we would account things like leap days, but as I discovered, it quickly becomes a lot more complicated than that. As Tom Scott explains in an episode of the YouTube Channel, “Computerphile,” a simple-sounding app like this can be jarringly complicated. For starters, to create this app for a worldwide audience, it seems reasonable to make it available in all time zones. To adjust it for each time zone seems straightforward enough. All you have to do is take the Greenwich Mean Time and add or subtract hours based on the time zone that the user is in, right? Not quite. Take daylight savings time, for instance. It varies from country to country when daylight savings starts, and then there are some states/countries that ...

Hello again! This is my first post for 343. Equally excited for this class as the other. Excelsior!

Hello world! This is my first post for CS-443. I am very excited for this semester and what's to come!