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This is a collection of the things I believe about software development. I have worked for years building backend and data processing systems, so read the below within that context.
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I've been using [Backblaze][bbz] for a while now as my online backup service. I have used a few others in the past. None were particularly satisfactory until Backblaze came along.
It was - still is - keenly priced at a flat $5 (£4) per month for unlimited backup (I've currently got just under half a terabyte backed-up). It has a fast, reliable client. The company itself is [transparent about their operations][trans] and [generous with their knowledge sharing][blog]. To me, this says they understand their customers well. I've never had reliability problems and everything about the outfit exudes a sense of simple, quick, solid quality. The service has even saved the day on a couple of occasions where I've lost files.
Safe to say, I'm a happy customer. If you're not already using Backblaze, [I highly recommend you do][recommend].
This document was originally written several years ago. At the time I was working as an execution core verification engineer at Arm. The following points are coloured heavily by working in and around the execution cores of various processors. Apply a pinch of salt; points contain varying degrees of opinion.
It is still my opinion that RISC-V could be much better designed; though I will also say that if I was building a 32 or 64-bit CPU today I'd likely implement the architecture to benefit from the existing tooling.
Mostly based upon the RISC-V ISA spec v2.0. Some updates have been made for v2.2
Original Foreword: Some Opinion
The RISC-V ISA has pursued minimalism to a fault. There is a large emphasis on minimizing instruction count, normalizing encoding, etc. This pursuit of minimalism has resulted in false orthogonalities (such as reusing the same instruction for branches, calls and returns) and a requirement for superfluous instructions which impacts code density both in terms of size and
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