The site is leafless.ca, but this is my ordinary programming blog, not anything about leafless itself.
For many years, I've been working in capacity planning using a combination of mathematical models and one-off test tools. I'm keeping the models: they're what make the work predictive, but it's time for a reusable tool that's simple and easy to add options to. Record-replay testing The classic way to do load testing is to… Continue reading Play it Again, Sam — a load testing tool
One of the most elegant ways to performance-test a program is to replay actual work that it did in the past. In these days of "everything is REST over HTTP", it's also one of the easiest. Introduction Once upon a time, a customer of mine needed to replace a storage array (the same one I… Continue reading Getting Disk Performance from a Web Server log
One of my customers needed to build a new large object-storage array, but using different software and hardware than the now-obsolescent product they have. That means that they had to migrate everything. Fortunately, the array is accessed via REST calls over https, so we have web-server logs. This is a story about how we used them… Continue reading Logs as Journals, a Migration Story
No, that's not something about bondage and discipline, it's behavior-directed development. In a previous life, we had a gazillion lines of unreachable code, but never knew what we could get rid of. In my current life, we have quite a small program that needs testing, but we left testing to the end. Could BDD help?… Continue reading A Few Days into BDD
I occasionally do guest posts in Slaw.ca, a legal blog. They're a bit different from my nerdly stuff, but are the origin of "leafless". In reverse chronological order, these are An AI to Make Me Smarter, 21 June 2017 The Case for Redesigning Caselaw, 15 May 2017 Unlimited Copying Versus Legal Publishing, 1 June 2016 Using Hypothes.is… Continue reading Slaw Links
I’m often puzzled by American politics, but it’s relatively simple. There are liberal and conservative parties, with ambiguous names, and they occasionally swap places. Usually they overlap, but not in this century. Canadian politics, however, can be confusing. There are five national parties, four of which are national, and they are named after what they… Continue reading Canadian Politics, as Seen by a Space-Alien
Once upon a time, I did an 8-month gig at NASDAQ, where my team spent their time moving a large suite of we called "crook detection" programs from one brand of computers to ours. At the end, we rolled them out to two largish buildings of people who spent their workdays finding "bad" or improper trades and fining… Continue reading How NASDAQ solved YouTube’s problem
