Making making better
We spend a lot of time and effort on training new people, and it never stops for long. Right now our winter-intern class is ending;...
13 Virtues
Very early on in his life, while on lengthy voyage from London to Philadelphia, Ben Franklin created a system of thirteen virtues to live his...
By: David Powers
Inspecting the Environment of a Running Process
Sometimes its useful to be able see the values of environment variables in running processes. We can use the following test program to see how...
By: Chris Perl
How to choose a teaching language
If you were teaching a programming course, what language would you teach it in?
By: Yaron Minsky
Interviewing At Jane Street
Software Engineering Interviews at Jane Street
By: David Powers
What the interns have wrought: RPC_parallel and Core_profiler
We’re in the midst of intern hiring season, and so we get a lot of questions about what it’s like to be an intern at...
By: Yaron Minsky
What is gained and lost with 63-bit integers?
Almost every programming language uses 64-bit integers on typical modern Intel machines. OCaml uses a special 63-bit representation. How does it affect OCaml?
By: Vladimir Brankov
Clearly Failing
The Parable Of The Perfect Connection
By: David Powers
The ML Workshop looks fantastic
I’m a little biased, by being on the steering committee, but this year’s ML workshop looks really interesting. Here’s a link to the program:
By: Yaron Minsky
Simple top-down development in OCaml
Often when writing a new module, I want to write the interface first and save the implementation for later. This lets me use the module...
By: Carl Eastlund
What's in a name?
In the once upon a time days of the First Age of Magic, the prudent sorcerer regarded his own true name as his most valued...
Inspecting Internal TCP State on Linux
Sometimes it can be useful to inspect the state of a TCP endpoint. Things such as the current congestion window, the retransmission timeout (RTO), duplicate...
By: Chris Perl
Making “never break the build” scale
I just stumbled across a post from earlier this year by Graydon Hoare, of Rust fame. The post is about what he calls the “Not...
By: Yaron Minsky
Notes on Naming
I’ve been thinking about naming recently, specifically the naming of new systems. It’s tempting to think of naming as trivial, but it really does matter....
By: Yaron Minsky
Reading Lamport, again
We’ve just kicked off an internal distributed-systems seminar. Our inaugral paper was Lamport’s classic “Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System”....
By: Yaron Minsky
Iron out your release process
This is the third in a series of posts about the design of Iron, our new code review and release management tool. The other two...
By: Yaron Minsky
Scrutinize your code in style
This is the second in a series of posts about the design of Iron, our new code review tool. You can read the first post...
By: Yaron Minsky
Code review that isn't boring
At Jane Street, we care a lot about code review. We think that high quality code, and in particular, readable code, helps us maintain the...
By: Yaron Minsky
