Brad Fitzpatrick

Here are my top ten, mostly web-related in some way because of my interests. These are the "loud alpha geeks" - the ones who broadcast their interests via regularly-updated blogs or curated links. (There are plenty of "quiet alpha geeks" who are just as "alpha" but not as easy to follow online.)

Brad Fitzpatrick (http://brad.livejournal.com/) - creator of LiveJournal and Danga, now at Google working on PubSubHubbub, the Social Graph API, etc.

John Resig (http://ejohn.org/, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jeresig) - jQuery, Mozilla, lots of other JavaScript and browser stuff.

Paul Bucheit (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=paul) - creator of GMail and FriendFeed, now at Facebook.

Ryan Tomayko (http://tomayko.com) - Ruby, Sinatra, now working at GitHub, has an excellent linkblog.

Simon Willison (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonw) - Django, Python, also has an excellent linkblog.

Leslie Orchard (http://decafbad.com/) - Previously at Delicious/Yahoo, wrote books on JavaScript, Dojo, RSS, now at Mozilla. Follow his bookmarks at: http://delicious.com/deusx

Mark Pilgrim (http://diveintomark.org/) - Atom, HTML5, Linux, Python, Greasemonkey, formerly at IBM, now at Google. Bookmarks at: http://delicious.com/wearehugh

John Gruber (http://daringfireball.net/) - Apple news and punditry, linkblog.

Sam Ruby (http://intertwingly.net/blog/) - Atom, Python, Ruby, Rails, XML, HTML5, SVG. Read what he reads at: http://planet.intertwingly.net/

Kevin Kelly…

There's plenty of network controlled power outlets. Either enterprise/rackmount PDUs, or consumer wifi outlets, or rig something up with a serial/parallel port and a relay. You'd use an always on test runner computer to control the power state.

The computer under test would boot from PXE, on boot read from the drive and determine the last write, send that to the test runner for analysis, then begin the write sequence and report ASAP to the test runner at each flush. The test runner turns the power off at random, waits a minute (or 10 seconds, whatever) and turns it back on and starts again.

In a well functioning system, you should often get back the last reported successful write, and sometimes get back a write beyond the last reported write (two generals and all), but never a write before the last reported write. You can't use this testing to prove correct flushing, but if you run for a week and it doesn't fail once, it's probably likely not to lie.

I haven't evaluated the code, but here's a post from 2005 with a link to code that probably works for this. (Note: this doesn't include the pxe booting or the power control... This just covers the what to write to the disk, how to report it to another machine, and how to check the results after a power cycle)

https://brad.livejournal.com/2116715.html?

"... I also recently wrote my own blogging platform (in Python). It's really simple -- no web UI for me (yet, anyway), and the whole thing is contained in a few hundred lines of code. ..."

This is sort of a geeks rite of passage. Some I can think of

- spolsky citydesk ~ http://www.fogcreek.com/CityDesk/

- bray custom perl scripts ~ http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/misc/Colophon

- dave winer ~ http://www.outliners.com/

- trotts ~ http://www.sixapart.com/about/corner/2004/05/its_about_time.html

- ev williams - http://www.blogger.com

- Fitzpatrick ~ http://brad.livejournal.com

"... I don't have comments, but I didn't want them anyway. People have written Wordpress plugins for virtually every need I might ever have, but plugins are a pain to deal with for problems that I can now solve in 3 lines of code. .."

One thing I found was you really think carefully before you create something. I've shunned comments as well (constraints I've chosen) only choosing static pages. The advantages for such a low volume site are speed & reliability. Though I have thought having a feedback loop would be nice have yet to really come to grips how (having no RT server based processing).

I'll let you know the url of the colophon when I release my site.

Some open source projects have "Easy to Fix" issues to get people on the roll (like Scikit-Learn), but many don't.

Some have overview of their source code and their design principles (like Redis) but many don't.

Some have good documentation of how to get your patches in main tree but many (especially those not hosted on github) don't have it.

Most notably for C/C++ projects, the undocumented dependencies to build the library can waste hours at a time.

Open source is great (I have contributed to a couple of projects) but not all projects are equal in terms of quality/easy-to-hack.

Brad Fitzpatrick has also written quite a bit about this http://brad.livejournal.com/2409049.html

Wow, this jogged a memory from when Brad Fitzpatrick (bradfitz on HN) had to write a utility to ensure the hard drives running LiveJournal didn't lie about successfully completing fsync().[1] IIRC, the behavior caused fairly serious database corruption after a power outage.

Went back and found the link. To my surprise, it was 15 years ago. To my greater surprise, the original post, the Slashdot article, and the utility all remain available.

And hard drives (or their NVMe successors) still lie.

[1] https://brad.livejournal.com/2116715.html

Dave also has a proposed notification standard of his own, called RSSCloud:

http://rsscloud.org/

There's been some drama between the developers of the two systems in the past:

* http://scripting.com/stories/2009/07/22/snappyRetardedAnswers.html

* http://brad.livejournal.com/2405147.html

* https://twitter.com/davewiner/status/23404535816912896

(Drama being nothing new to the RSS world, alas. Sigh)