blog-mining nathan_marz_storm knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
the latest blogs:
1 nathan marz storm-2014-05-10-Why we in tech must support Lawrence Lessig
Introduction: I'm an entrepreneur and a programmer. I've been fortunate to work in an industry that has seen incredible growth the past 10 years. It's amazing that an entrepreneur can launch services that reach millions of people with very, very small amounts of capital. Startups can compete with established services on a level playing field because the internet does not discriminate between different services. The internet is neutral. This has enabled an explosion of services that has provided massive amounts of value to the entire world. I'm not here to convince you of the importance of net neutrality. This has been done thoroughly here , here , here , and here . Instead I want to talk about a much deeper issue. Losing net neutrality would be extremely harmful to our society and our economy, and it's not hard to see this. And yet, the government seems to have a lot of trouble understanding this. The government could fix this problem instantly by reclassifying the internet from an "informat
2 nathan marz storm-2014-02-24-The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies
Introduction: Update: I originally quoted the average price of office space as $36 / square foot / month, where in reality it's per year. So I was accidentally weakening my own argument! The post has been updated to reflect the right number. The "open floor plan" has really taken over tech companies in San Francisco. Offices are organized as huge open spaces with row after row of tables. Employees sit next to each other and each have their own piece of desk space. Now, I don't want to comment on the effectiveness of open floor plans for fields other than my own. But for software development, this is the single best way to sabotage the productivity of your entire engineering team . The problem Programming is a very brain-intensive task. You have to hold all sorts of disparate information in your head at once and synthesize it into extremely precise code. It requires intense amounts of focus. Distractions and interruptions are death to the productivity of a programmer. And an open-floor plan e
3 nathan marz storm-2014-02-12-Interview with "Programmer Magazine"
Introduction: I was recently interviewed for "Programmer Magazine", a Chinese magazine. The interview was published in Chinese, but a lot of people told me they'd like to see the English version of the interview. Due to the Google translation being, ahem, a little iffy, I decided to just publish the original English version on my blog. Hope you enjoy! What drew you to programming and what was the first interesting program you wrote? I started programming when I was 10 years old on my TI-82 graphing calculator. Initially I started programming because I wanted to make games on my calculator – and also because I was bored in math class :D. The first interesting game I made on my calculator was an archery game where you'd shoot arrows at moving targets. You'd get points for hitting more targets or completing all the targets faster. A couple years later I graduated to programming the TI-89 which was a huge upgrade in power. I remember how the TI-82 only let you have 26 variables (for the character
4 nathan marz storm-2013-04-12-Break into Silicon Valley with a blog
Introduction: I know a lot of non-technical people who would love to work in the venture-funded startup world, from consultants to finance people to other business types for which I'm not really sure exactly what it is they do. They hit obstacles trying to get into the startup world, finding that their skills are either irrelevant or hard to explain. My advice to all these people is the same: Write a blog. A blog can improve your life in enormous ways. Or to put it in business-speak: a blog has one of the highest ROI's of anything you can do. Put yourself in the shoes of startups looking for talent. First off – startups are desperate for talent. The problem is that it's very difficult to identify great people – startups search through loads and loads of candidates. Resumes and interviews only tell you so much about a person. It's really hard to stand out in a resume – you're not the only one putting over-inflated impressive-looking numbers and bullet points on your resume. And interviews
5 nathan marz storm-2013-04-02-Principles of Software Engineering, Part 1
Introduction: This is the first in a series of posts on the principles of software engineering. There's far more to software engineering than just "making computers do stuff" – while that phrase is accurate, it does not come close to describing what's involved in making robust, reliable software. I will use my experience building large scale systems to inform a first principles approach to defining what it is we do – or should be doing – as software engineers. I'm not interested in tired debates like dynamic vs. static languages – instead, I intend to explore the really core aspects of software engineering. The first order of business is to define what software engineering even is in the first place. Software engineering is the construction of software that produces some desired output for some range of inputs. The inputs to software are more than just method parameters: they include the hardware on which it's running, the rate at which it receives data, and anything else that influences the oper
6 nathan marz storm-2013-04-01-My new startup
Introduction: There's been a lot of speculation about what my new startup is doing, so I've decided to set the record straight and reveal all. We are working on one of the biggest problems on Earth, a problem that affects nearly every person on this planet. Our products will significantly improve the quality of life for billions of people. We are going to revolutionize the bedsheet industry. Think about it. There's been almost no innovation in bedsheets in thousands of years. There's nothing worse than waking up to discover one of the corners of your Egyptian cotton fitted sheets has slipped off the mattress. How is this not a solved problem yet? Why are we still using sheets with that annoying elastic in it to secure them to our mattresses? They slip all the time – and if you have a deep mattress, good luck finding sheets that even fit. You're just screwed. Consider the impact of solving this problem, of a bedsheet product that never slips, that always stays secure on the mattre
7 nathan marz storm-2013-03-16-Leaving Twitter
Introduction: Yesterday was my last day at Twitter. I left to start my own company. What I'll be working on is very exciting (though I'm keeping it secret for now). Leaving Twitter was a tough decision. I worked with a whole bunch of great people on fascinating problems with some of the most interesting data in the world. Ultimately though, I felt that if I didn't make this move, I would regret it for the rest of my life. So I put in my papers about a month ago and then spent a month transitioning my team for my departure. This ends an eventful three years that started with me joining BackType in January of 2010. So much has happened in these past three years. I open-sourced Cascalog , ElephantDB , and Storm , started writing a book , gave a lot of talks , and in July of 2011 experienced the thrill of being acquired . My projects spread beyond BackType and Twitter to be relied on by dozens and dozens of companies . Through all this, I learned an enormous amount about entrepreneurship, p
8 nathan marz storm-2012-09-19-Storm's 1st birthday
Introduction: Storm was open-sourced exactly one year ago today. It's been an action-packed year for Storm, to say the least. Here's some of the exciting stuff that's happened over the past year: 27 companies have publicized that they're using Storm in production . I know of at least a few more companies using it that haven't published anything yet. O'Reilly published a book on Storm. The Storm mailing list has over 1300 members, with over 500 messages per month. The @stormprocessor account has over 1200 followers. More than 4000 people have starred the project on Github . There's a regular Storm meetup in the Bay Area with over 230 members. I've also seen lots of Storm-focused meetups happen all over the world over the past year. 29 people all over the world have contributed to the codebase We released Trident , a high level abstraction for realtime computation, that is a major leap forward in what's possible in realtime. Libraries have been released integrating Stor
9 nathan marz storm-2012-02-06-Suffering-oriented programming
Introduction: Someone asked me an interesting question the other day: "How did you justify taking such a huge risk on building Storm while working on a startup ?" (Storm is a realtime computation system). I can see how from an outsider's perspective investing in such a massive project seems extremely risky for a startup. From my perspective, though, building Storm wasn't risky at all. It was challenging, but not risky. I follow a style of development that greatly reduces the risk of big projects like Storm. I call this style "suffering-oriented programming." Suffering-oriented programming can be summarized like so: don't build technology unless you feel the pain of not having it. It applies to the big, architectural decisions as well as the smaller everyday programming decisions. Suffering-oriented programming greatly reduces risk by ensuring that you're always working on something important, and it ensures that you are well-versed in a problem space before attempting a large investment. I ha
10 nathan marz storm-2012-01-09-Early access edition of my book is available
Introduction: The early access edition of my book Big Data: principles and best practices of scalable realtime data systems is now available from Manning! I've been working on this book for quite some time, and I'm excited to have it out there and start getting some feedback. The interest in the book has already been overwhelming, and I've been answering questions about it on Hacker News .