Plurrrr

XML is precisely what it says on the tin: an extensible markup language. It’s a markup language with a completely uniform syntax so that the alphabet of markup elements is customizable. And for what it is, there is truly no replacement. Every other markup language supports only a limited set of markup directives defined from the factory. The tradeoff is generality for ease of authoring: limited markup languages can have terser syntax for specific elements.

Over the last 2 years, we moved our inherently sequential data processing engine, written in Haskell, to a parallel version. Running the parallel version of our system barely increases CPU time, while the wall time (time from start to end) is significantly reduced.

There are many pitfall that can lead to useless, wasteful and confusing logs. Therefore I follow a specific set of practices which allows me to write better logs while also being consistent across the system.

You should remmember that logging is for the developers, you are going to be the only one who’s reading them, so as you are about to log something, ask yourself this:

• Is this log really needed? does it rely important information I couldn’t get from the other logs in the same flow?
• Am I going to log an object that can be huge on production? If so, can I just log a few metrics of that objects instead? for example, it’s length, or handpick a few important attribute to log.
• Does the information I am about to log will help me to debug/understand the flow?

Detective Harry Hole investigates the disappearance of a woman whose scarf is found wrapped around an ominous-looking snowman.