Rachel Kroll

Rachel by the Bay (https://rachelbythebay.com/) has long impressed me as someone who clearly is deep in the actual work of systems, day in and day out, and can write well about it. Julia Evans has a wonderful approach as well, and has amazing talent for teaching: https://jvns.ca/ Kellan Elliott-McCrea (https://laughingmeme.org/) has given the world some of the better advice on the hardest parts of software scaling, which is of course scaling the human organizations. New grads are virtually always underestimating that part of the work; eventually you realize the hard problems are usually social and not technical.

Not updated on a daily basis, but always worth reading: http://antirez.com/ https://danluu.com/ http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/ https://rachelbythebay.com/

Honestly, if she’s ready to graduate High school and enter college, she’s old enough to be researching those questions on her own (not that you can’t too). She should be, too. Learning how to learn in your industry is an actual skill to learn. Learning what the “pulse” of the industry is will also be valuable for her during studies and beyond, and she’ll also meet peers who can have those discussions with her. That said, I think for many this forum is actually the place to learn about the industry. It’s too broad an industry to find more specifics without knowing her interests. Does she like startups? Does she care more about the business side? Financial tech? AI? App development? Does she not know? This site is honestly a great mixed aggregator of other sites. Find interesting ones and see the other posts. She’s in HS so the bar is low on deep technical knowledge and expectations. She should probably focus less on intense research topics unless she has an actual interest in a more academic side (simply because academic research is less approachable to someone without much academic experience). If she doesn’t have an answer to those questions, I would say she just start googling things that pique curiosity. “How does X work” is how I started. That’s how I learned which buzzwords and jargon mattered to me. Probably more approachable for a younger person earlier on the journey. Here are some newsletters I follow. My interests skew towards business. Bits About…

It's https://rachelbythebay.com/ and doesn't seem to be down.

And the follow-up article: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/01/27/scale/

Not corporate, but two of the best individual developer blogs are Eli Bendersky's and Rachel by the Bay. They've both been blogging prolifically for a decade+, Eli with a focus on, broadly, compilers and Rachel on SRE/debugging. Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing is also required reading for anyone that works with Windows. https://eli.thegreenplace.net/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

If you're doing your own reader, please check Rachel by the Bay's Feed Reader Score Project: https://rachelbythebay.com/fs/ And follow the best practices: https://rachelbythebay.com/fs/help.html Basically you don't want to hammer the server every minute or even every day if the feed updates once a week. Use ETags and Last-Modified properly.

She is a known technology blogger https://rachelbythebay.com, active for more than a decade. Her posts often make it to front page. I'd trust her enough to remove a non-essential component like atop basically.

Rachel has posted a follow-up: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/03/26/atop/ > user1 does something... and gets user2 to blow up. If you can make that do something useful, then you get user2 to run stuff on your behalf.

I think it's little appreciated that planets solve many of the practical problems of feed crawling. If you wanted to follow 2000 blogs yourself you'd find it is really a hassle. You can follow one planet and its easy. For that matter, if 2000 people want to follow your blog (and many other blogs) they are going to generate 2000 requests per polling period. It is not wonder why people like [1] get so exasperated. There are three kinds of polling periods: (1) too fast, (2) too slow, (3) both at the same time. Instead of having 2000 people poll your blog too often, one planet can poll your blog. It improves the scalability and economics of the system dramatically. (e.g. the difficulty of finding a good polling regime is one of 10 or 20 or so unappreciated reasons why RSS has remained nerdcore) [1] https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/27/feed/

Rachel has been writing about feed readers a lot on their blog the past year (https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ shows 21 results for "feed reader"), so this is part of a whole narrative. If you're interested in it, I highly recommend just reading from start to end. It's all quite interesting (including building out a whole test service for feed readers to get scored on their behavior)

I don't know anything about the browser extension but it is probably worthwhile looking for any settings to change its behaviour. [1] Additionally you could try and test it to see how it's actually performing [2] [1] https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/12/17/packets/ [2] https://rachelbythebay.com/fs/

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ is currently doing some great digging into RSS readers, so her posts may be useful to peruse.

Have you run this by RachelByTheBay's feed reader testing thing? http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/30/fs/ Probably worth at least reading through this post: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/08/02/fs/ to learn from other feed reader developer's mistakes...

There is a followup post saying that the module is disconnecting from the network after 11hrs, the cause seems a bit murky (I'd say probably a firmware issue but haven't looked in to it at all) https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/01/24/fail/

@rachelbythebay's HN spoof is still my personal favorite: https://rachelbythebay.com/fun/hrand/

I'm not sure about SRE specific or CI specific writing but at risk of answering another question, here's what comes to mind for me. In the Operations space my favorite writer is Charity Majors, although a lot of what she talks about isn't OPs specific: https://charity.wtf/ Rachel by the Bay is also great: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ Totally not related, but Phil Eaton's posts on how databases work are super interesting and lack fluff. https://notes.eatonphil.com/ In terms of CI and builds, I try to write some on this topic for the Earthly Blog. My Bazel article was recently on Hn. Here are my posts: https://earthly.dev/blog/authors/adam/ Warning though, I also write about lots of other stuff. Are there specific CI topics you'd like to see covered?

Yes. It’s called “understanding your constraints”. The inverse is “appeal to higher power”; (implication being that its almost religion since it’s based on faith). However: if you think that running large systems is hard, then it follows that it’s better to deploy small systems. There can be times to outsource for sure, and I’m being relatively glib: but this idea of rent vs own is quite pervasive in the industry and it leads to dangerous situations where entire companies grind to a halt because these trade offs were talked down. Regardless of that; understanding the trade offs is important, the famous “your nines are not my nines” is good to reference here: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2019/07/15/giant/

Julia Evans - https://jvns.ca/ Rachel By the Bay - https://rachelbythebay.com/ Monica Cellio - https://cellio.dreamwidth.org Mark Dominus - https://blog.plover.com/ Morlock Publishing - https://twitter.com/MorlockP Admiral Cloudberg - https://old.reddit.com/r/AdmiralCloudberg/

I was interviewing for software jobs recently, and while I was studying up on the "system design" portion I kept circling around the same insight that Dan Luu writes about so well here. I would sit down at an interview and try to create these "proper" system designs with boxes and arrows and failovers and caches and well tuned databases. But in the back of my mind I kept thinking, "didn't Facebook scale to a billion users with PHP, MySQL, and Memcache?" It reminds me of "Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster" at https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-… , and the occasional post by https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ where she builds a box that's just fast and with very basic tooling (and a lot of know-how).

You should probably read the follow-up that was written after this was last posted on HN. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/05/23/nope/

Probably HN. She wrote this post in November: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2021/11/06/sql/ That got this response on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139902 And followed up with this post: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2021/11/07/select/ Turn on "show dead" in your preferences here on HN and check out the second page, in particular.

I agree just went on to check couple of posts: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/03/03/emoji/ This one stands out as "you are all dumb and I am so smart". Then also that person does not understand that one should keep hers "edgy" stuff for group of her besties. Or at least understand that other people might not be in the same context. So for the original story posted - well I don't trust the narration. It just seems there was lack of communication.

I've gotten out of the habit of checking blogs on the regular (which is a bad thing), but I do catch up on these when it crosses my mind: - http://rachelbythebay.com/ - https://www.hanselman.com/blog/

JSON is so slow and inefficient. All that marshaling and unmarshaling is crazy. Binary formats will rise again. This comment says it best I think, "On the other hand, if you only need 53 bits of your 64 bit numbers, and enjoy blowing CPU on ridiculously inefficient marshaling and unmarshaling steps, hey, [JSON parsing] is your funeral." - Source https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2019/07/21/reliability/

Rachel's blog posts are brilliant for preparing for stuff like this. She's highlighted some great clues to look out for in the past, like seeing the constant 0x48545450 where it shouldn't be[1]. [1] https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/02/21/malloc/

> I sure hope it's mostly just a persona for her blog, because otherwise why put yourself through such misery? I don't follow her blog enough to fill in the details, but if I understand correctly this is from a job she hated and left recently-ish due to how bad everything was [1]. So she's not putting up with it, but rather giving retrospectives on a bad couple of years. [1] http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/03/04/annoyed/

Yep this is why, more and more, developers are simply doing private repositories. They might exist on GitHub. Or a torrent or something. Rachel goes into more detail about them here. Basically people fix things and don't commit them back upstream because doing so is too much of a political headache. > While it's probably true that the dictator does suck at design, the talented user wants no part of the drama which would follow such a report. There is absolutely no benefit to lighting that particular fuse. And so, the problem is never reported, and the patch is never conveyed upstream. It effectively becomes a private fork limited to the talented user's systems. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/10/09/moat/

This reminded me of another website which generates great fun and mischief from tech jargon, "Whacker News:" https://rachelbythebay.com/fun/hrand/

The linked article from 2013 is worth a read, too: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/06/03/bugs/