FeedCity: davewiner/hackerNewsStars

<antirez>
28 Feb 2014

What is performance?

http://antirez.com/news/73

The title of this blog post is an apparently trivial to answer question, however it is worth to consider a bit better what performance really means: it is easy to get confused between scalability and performance, and to decompose performance, in the specific case of database ...

<antirez>
26 Feb 2014

Happy birthday Redis!

http://antirez.com/news/72

Today Redis is 5 years old, at least if we count starting from the initial HN announcement [1], that’s actually a good starting point. After all an open source project really exists as soon as it is public. I’m a bit shocked I worked for five years straight to the same thing...

<antirez>
21 Feb 2014

A simple distributed algorithm for small idempotent information

http://antirez.com/news/71

In this blog post I’m going to describe a very simple distributed algorithm that is useful in different programming scenarios. The algorithm is useful when you need to take some kind of information synchronized among a number of processes. The information can be everything as...

Fabien Sanglard
14 Feb 2014

Algorithms and Data structures books: One size doesn't fit them all

Over the years running this moderately popular website, I have been asked many times what is the best book about Algorithms and Data Structures. The answer is always "It depends" ! It depends on how the programmer's brain works and what kind of notation he is comfortable with. There are many flavors of mindset out there but it usually comes down to Mathematics and Illustrations...

<antirez>
20 Jan 2014

Redis Cluster and limiting divergences.

http://antirez.com/news/70

Redis Cluster is finally on its road to reach the first stable release in a short timeframe as already discussed in the Redis google group [1]. However despite a design never proposed for the implementation of Redis Cluster was analyzed and discussed at long in the past weeks...

Mitchell Hashimoto
10 Jan 2014

Comparing Filesystem Performance in Virtual Machines

<antirez>
18 Dec 2013

Some fun with Redis Cluster testing

http://antirez.com/news/69

One of the steps to reach the goal of providing a "testable" Redis Cluster experience to users within a few weeks, is some serious testing that goes over the usual "I'm running 3 nodes in my macbook, it works". Finally this is possible, since Redis Cluster entered into the "r...

Fabien Sanglard
07 Oct 2013

Learning Legendary Hardware

If you love software, you also try to understand the hardware to the deep down. It is not an easy task : There are many great programming books but few that explains hardware very well (as Michael Abrash once wrote: the Intel Documentation is "slightly more fun to read than the phone book"). In my quest for knowledge, I found two hardware books to be outstanding:

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software.
Computer Organization and Design.

Those books are good for "current" hardware but there is a lot to learn from previous generations. The cult machine That Wouldn't Die, the Amiga with its elegant co-processor architecture is a vivid example.

More...

Fabien Sanglard
21 Sep 2013

Decyphering the Business Card Raytracer

I recently came across Paul Heckbert's business card raytracer. For those that have never heard of it: It is a very famous challenge in the Computer Graphics field that started on May 4th, 1984 via a post on comp.graphics by Paul Heckbert ( More about this in his article "A Minimal Ray Tracer" from the book Graphics Gems IV).

The goal was to produce the source code for a raytracer...that would fit on the back of a business card.

Andrew Kensler's version is mesmerizing and one of the greatest hack that I have seen. Since I am curious, I decided to deconstruct it: Here is what I understood.

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Fabien Sanglard
04 Sep 2013

Doom III BFG Documentation

id Software developer Jan Paul Van Waveren (a.k.a Mr Elusive) send me his technical notes about Doom 3 BFG. I was especially interested in the "Compute vs. Memory" section which confirms that CPU are now so fast that it is often better to calculate something than fetch it from RAM.

Jan Paul was also kind enough to share a list of all the publications related to idTech4 engine (see bottom of this page).

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Fabien Sanglard
16 Aug 2013

Second Reality Code Review

On July 23, 2013 the source code of Second Reality was released. Like many, I was eager to look at the internals of a demo that inspired me so much over the last 20 years.

I was expecting a monolithic mess of assembly but instead I found a surprisingly elaborated architecture, mixing several languages in an elegant way. The code is something like I had never seen before that perfectly represents two essential aspects of demomaking :

Team work.
Obfuscation.

As usual I have cleaned up my notes into an article: I hope it will save some a few hours and maybe inspire others to read more source code and become better engineers.

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Mitchell Hashimoto
28 Jun 2013

Packer

Mitchell Hashimoto
18 Jun 2013

The Tao of Vagrant

Fabien Sanglard
14 Jun 2013

Prince Of Persia Code Review

On Apr 17, 2012 Jordan Mechner released the source code of Prince of Persia. I immediately took at look at it!

Mitchell Hashimoto
06 Jun 2013

Automation Obsessed

Fabien Sanglard
23 May 2013

Doom3 BFG Code Review

On November 26, 2012 id Software released the source code of Doom 3 BFG edition (only one month after the game hit the stores). The 10 years old idTech 4 engine has been updated with some of the technology found in idTech 5 (the game engine running Rage) and it was an interesting reading session.

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Mitchell Hashimoto
21 Mar 2013