The Big Data Deception Big data is going to be awesome for the few select industries that have the skills and the need for it. But they are few and far between. Most of the others will just jump on the Big Data bandwagon as the next in a long line of money wasters that introduce more complexity into the enterprise.

The Inevitability of Evil Why are big companies so often seen as evil. Is corporate evil inevitable? Small companies don’t seem to be tarnished with the evil brush. So is it related to how we view growth and is there a limit at which corporations should just stop growing and leave room for others to step in.

A few thoughts about Open Source Software For a decade and half I contributed to open source regularly, and still it is relatively rare that I stop to think a bit more about what this means for me. Probably it is just because I like to write code, so this is how I use my time: writing

PSYNC Dear Redis users, in the final part of 2012 I repeated many time that the focus, for 2013, is all about Redis Cluster and Redis Sentinel. This is exactly what I’m going to do from the point of view of the big picture, however there are many smaller features that make

ADS-B wine cork antenna Software defined radio is cool About one week ago I received my RTLSDR dongle, entering the already copious crew of software defined radio enthusiasts. It’s really a lot of fun, for instance from my home that is at about 10 km from the Catania Airport I can listen the tower talking

Partial resyncs and synchronous replication Currently I’m working on Redis partial resynchronization of slaves as I wrote in previous blog posts. The idea is that we have a backlog of the replication stream, up to the specified amount of bytes (this will be in the order of a few megabytes by default). If a slave lost the

Twemproxy a Redis proxy from Twitter While a big number of users use large farms of Redis nodes, from the point of view of the project itself currently Redis is a mostly single-instance business. I’ve big plans about going distributed with the project, to the extent that I’m no longer evaluating any threaded version of Redis: for

Redis Crashes Premise: a small rant about software reliability. === I’m very serious about software reliability, and this is not just a good thing. It is good in a sense, as I tend to work to ensure that the software I release is solid. At the same time I think I take this issue a

The Grand High Order of the Easter Bunny Open source doesn’t just work because it’s better quality (generally) than closed source software. It works because it’s far easier to weave knowledge of it into an organisation. If everybody can use it then anybody can become expert in it. The lack of licenses, training, etc demystifies and democratises software which massively improves it’s changes of long term success in the business. ...

The New New Tool A change story for everyday folk. Any similarities to projects ongoing or past are entirely intentional.