...or, on second thought, maybe I would

(Previous blog post on coping with Parkinson)

"This is a bit ironic", I told my "Stimulator specialist nurse" as he was instructing me how to use this new device, that just made me 5 years younger and maybe extended my life with 20+ years.

"I'm a world famous Linux and open source enthusiast, and now you're giving me an iPhone-only app that I must use or I'll die..."

This is just a "note to self" or cheatsheet...

I'm working on the new distributed consensus algorithm about to appear in Cassandra 5.0. I see that I frequently lose momentum when I have to resort to the formal definition of the algorithm. Because I was never good at reading mathematical notation with a lot of greek letters...

So, let's translate the greek letters to English words:

It's time to pick up our series on consistency and replication again. See consistency tag for the previous paper reviews on the topic.

I had thought I could live a happy life as a database engineer, and eventually retire, without ever having to actually read any literature on Paxos.

How did it start?

Parkinson's disease develops slowly, we don't know what causes it, and it can't be stopped. But for most patients, the key word is slowly.

Apparently a common early symptom is a weakened sense of smells. I had that since my teenage years. I just thought it was because I was allergic a lot.

If you work in a tech startup, you probably have some options. If you work(ed) at a successful startup, you know that when the day comes that you exercise and sell your options, you get to pay income tax on the difference between the low strike price you paid vs the high market price the stock are actually worth.

There's a Swedish jazz sång, originally performed by Monica Zetterlund, that I find beautiful.

Sakta vi gå genom stan. (Beppe Wolgers, Roy Turk and Fred E. Ahlert, 1961)

The song is about a couple walking home, through the streets of Stockholm, in a bright summer night.

As I started at Datastax in June of the past year, I also swinged back from being an IC engineer to being an engineering manager. This is a common topic to blog about, see for example Adam Comerford and Charity Majors.

One thing that struck me when reading up on Cassandra is that there is a very strong mindset in the Cassandra community around linear scalability and therefore on primary key based data models. So de-normalizing your data, such as by using materialized views is considered a best practice.

However, de-normalization has some challenges of its own. Both Cassandra-managed materialized views or any other application side managed denormalization run the risk of becoming inconsistent. And of course it does mean you're multiplying your database size.