Plurrrr

Years ago I wrote a blog post about exponential backoff and jitter, which has turned out to be enduringly popular. I like to believe that it's influenced at least a couple of systems to add jitter, and become more stable. However, I do feel a little guilty about pushing the popularity of jitter without clearly explaining what backoff and jitter do, and do not do.

I ran git status on a newly created, very small repository, but the command took more than 10 seconds to finish. This was highly unusual, as git status is mostly instantaneous for me. Indeed it was instantaneous the next time I ran it on the same repository. Puzzled, I could only think of one thing out of the ordinary: I had just rebooted my Mac. So I tried rebooting again, and then the issue occurred again!

This article demonstrates how to use quaternions for practical applications. In it, we build intuition about how to use quaternions as building blocks to solve engineering and geometry problems. Applications include computer graphics, attitude systems for air and spacecraft, and structural chemistry models. You may have read that quaternions have advantages over Euler angles to represent orientations, including preventing gimbal lock, and advantages over rotation matrices, such as more efficient computation, and compact form. This is true. You may have also read that they're complicated, difficult to use, or counter-intuitive. This isn't!