Towards a theory of software development expertise

December 21, 2018May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 13 Comments

Towards a theory of software development expertise Baltes et al., ESEC/FSE'18 This is the last paper we’ll be looking at this year, so I’ve chosen something a little more reflective to leave you with (The Morning Paper will return on Monday 7th January, 2019). The question Baltes and Diehl tackle is this: "How do you ... Continue Reading

Identifying impactful service system problems via log analysis

December 19, 2018May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

Identifying impactful service system problems via log analysis He et al., ESEC/FSE'18 If something is going wrong in your system, chances are you’ve got two main sources to help you detect and resolve the issue: logs and metrics. You’re unlikely to be able to get to the bottom of a problem using metrics alone (though ... Continue Reading

Applied machine learning at Facebook: a datacenter infrastructure perspective

December 17, 2018May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

Applied machine learning at Facebook: a datacenter infrastructure perspective Hazelwood et al., _HPCA’18 _ This is a wonderful glimpse into what it’s like when machine learning comes to pervade nearly every part of a business, with implications top-to-bottom through the whole stack. It’s amazing to step back and think just how fundamentally software systems have ... Continue Reading

Darwinian data structure selection

December 14, 2018May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 9 Comments

Darwinian data structure selection Basios et al., FSE'18 GraphIt may have caught your attention for the success of its approach, but I suspect for many readers it’s not something you’ll be immediately applying. Darwinian Data Structures (DDSs) on the other hand looks to be of immediate interest to many Java and C++ projects (and generalises ... Continue Reading

GraphIt: A high-performance graph DSL

December 12, 2018May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

GraphIt: a high-performance graph DSL Zhang et al., OOPSLA'18 See also: http://graphit-lang.org/. The problem with finding the optimal algorithm and data structures for a given problem is that so often it depends. This is especially true when it comes to graph algorithms. It is difficult to implement high-performance graph algorithms. The performance bottlenecks of these ... Continue Reading

MadMax: surviving out-of-gas conditions in Ethereum smart contracts

December 10, 2018May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments

MadMax: surviving out-of-gas conditions in ethereum smart contracts Grech et al., OOPSLA'18 We’re transitioning to look at a selection of papers from the recent OOPSLA conference this week. MadMax won a distinguished paper award, and makes a nice bridge from the CCS blockchain papers we were looking at last week. Analysis and verification of smart ... Continue Reading

RapidChain: scaling blockchain via full sharding

December 7, 2018May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

RapidChain: scaling blockchain via full sharding Zamani et al., CCS'18 RapidChain is a sharding-based public blockchain protocol along the lines of OmniLedger that we looked at earlier in the year. RapidChain is resilient to Byzantine faults from up to 1/3 of its participants, requires no trusted setup, and can achieve more than 7,300 tx/sec with ... Continue Reading

FairSwap: how to fairly exchange digital goods

December 5, 2018May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

FairSwap: how to fairly exchange digital goods Dziembowski et al., CCS'18 (Preprint) This is a transactions paper with a twist. The transactions we’re talking about are purchases of digital assets. More specifically, the purchase of a file (document, movie, archive of a dataset, ...). The property we strongly care about is atomicity: either the seller ... Continue Reading

Securify: practical security analysis of smart contracts

December 3, 2018May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Securify: practical security analysis of smart contracts Tsankov et al., CCS'18 Sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good. When we’re talking about securing smart contracts, we need all the help we can get! Bugs can cost millions of dollars. Securify uses a set of expert heuristics (patterns) to help identify issues in smart ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
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Month: December 2018