Chartbeat Engineering internally came up with a set of best practices on naming things (watch for a future blog post on this!). Here’s a follow up that points out that tests need sane names too.

SoundCloud published details on their open-source service monitoring system, Prometheus, which is doing some interesting stuff with multi-dimensional querying.

The folks at Atlassian have come up with a better pull request: compare changes against the tip of master and see conflicts as they occur. File that in the department of “duh why weren’t we doing that before?”

Think of the boy bands when scheduling your developer conference.

Really awesome overview of different TCP implementations.

‘Why Clojure?’ answered by a Pythoneer. Immutability encourages pushing application state to the db, the REPL and clojure class loader, and benefits of the JVM. Chartbeat has traditionally been predominantly a Python shop, but we’re introducing Clojure in certain parts of our code base, so this is particularly interesting to us.

Rendezvous Hashing accomplishes the same goal as consistent hashing and was developed independently around the same time. The algorithm is intuitively simpler and has a straightforward implementation, though its performance characteristics are dependent on object size. That said, it might be a good replacement for some consistent hashing use cases.

Happy Friday everyone!

Welcome back! This Weekliest Links is a doozy, including some things we read over break. Get yourself a cistern of coffee and cozy up to a blazing fire if you’re getting the same chill we are in NYC and check ’em out:

“[Haskell] is the most advanced of the obsolete languages,” starts Gerald Sussman in We Really Don’t Know How To Compute. And then he promptly shames the expressiveness of our tools as compared to biology.

Sometimes “boring” can be a strength. The Boring Front-End Developer specifically targets the Frontend but its concepts can be applied to a much wider audience. As Chartbeat continues to grow, it will be increasingly important to find the correct balance between “cool” and “boring” when it comes to our engineering practices.