Quote of the day

This blog started up as a place to post interesting things I do. I haven't done much (that I would blog about), so here is a quote to keep the site live.


It may be a bit unusual, but my way of thinking of "distributed systems" was the 30+ year (and still continuing) effort to make many systems look like one. Distributed transactions, quorum algorithms, RPC, synchronous request-response, tightly-coupled schema, and similar efforts all try to mask the existence of independence from the application developer and from the user. In other words, make it look to the application like many systems are one system. While I have invested a significant portion of my career working in this effort, I have repented and believe that we are evolving away from this approach.
-- Pat Helland

Phrase of the day

"There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all" Peter Drucker, 1963