craigtp

Advanced Distributed System Design Course - Udi Dahan

Notes by Craig Phillips

Fallacies of Distributed Computing

• There are 11 fallacies of Distributed Computing:
  1. The network is reliable
  2. Latency isn’t a problem
  3. Bandwidth isn’t a problem
  4. The network is secure

5. The topology won’t change

jbenet

a simple git branching model (written in 2013)

This is a very simple git workflow. It (and variants) is in use by many people. I settled on it after using it very effectively at Athena. GitHub does something similar; Zach Holman mentioned it in this talk.

Update: Woah, thanks for all the attention. Didn't expect this simple rant to get popular.

philsturgeon

Never Expose DB Results Directly

1. If you rename a field, then your users are fucked. Convert with a hardcoded array structure.
2. Most DB drivers [for PHP] will show integers as numeric strings and false as "0", so you want to typecast them.
3. Unless you're using an ORM with "hidden" functionality, people will see passwords, salts and all sorts of fancy codes. If you add one and forget to put it in your $hidden array then OOPS!

Use the URI sparingly, and correctly

1. Use the query string for paired params instead of /users/id/5/active/true. Your API does not need to be SEO optimised.
2. ?format=xml is stupid, use an Accept: application/xml header. I added this to the CodeIgniter Rest Server once for lazy people, and now people think it's a thing. It's not.