Summer Recess

It's summer recess time on The Morning Paper. I'm taking July off from daily publishing, and paper reviews will resume again on Monday 3rd August. I've hugely enjoyed interacting with all of you over the last few months - according to WordPress there have been just shy of a quarter of a million visits to ... Continue Reading

Helping Developers Help Themselves: Automatic Decomposition of Code Review Changes

Helping Developers Help Themselves: Automatic Decomposition of Code Review Changes - Barnett et al. 2015 Earlier this week we saw that pull requests with well organised commits are strongly preferred by integrators. Unfortunately, developers often make changes that incorporate multiple bug fixes, feature additions, refactorings, etc.. These result in changes that are both large and ... Continue Reading

Work Practices and Challenges in Pull-Based Development

Work Practices and Challenges in Pull-based Development - Gousios et al. 2015 In the recent years, we are witnessing that collaborative, lightweight code review is increasingly becoming the default mechanism for integrating changes, in both collocated and distributed development. Effectively, the pull request (in various forms) is becoming the atomic unit of software change. How ... Continue Reading

Spinning Fast Iterative Dataflows

Spinning Fast Iterative Dataflows - Ewen et al. 2012 Last week we saw how Naiad combines low-latency stream processing with iterative computation, and yesterday we looked in more detail at the Differential Dataflow model for incremental processing (needed for low-latency). The Apache Flink project also combines low-latency stream processing with support for incremental, iterative computation. ... Continue Reading

Differential Dataflow

Differential Dataflow - McSherry et al. 2013 The ability to perform complex analyses on [datasets that are constantly being updated] is very valuable; for example, each tweet published on the Twitter social network may supply new information about the community structure of the service’s users, which could be immediately exploited for real-time recommendation services or ... Continue Reading

Heracles: Improving Resource Efficiency at Scale

Heracles: Improving Resource Efficiency at Scale - Lo et al. 2015 Until recently, scaling from Moore’s law provided higher compute per dollar with every server generation, allowing datacenters to scale without raising the cost. However, with several imminent challenges in technology scaling, alternate approaches are needed. Those approaches involve increasing server utilization, which is still ... Continue Reading