A sweep through my Instapaper for June 2012

I'm not sure if I'll do this every month, but it does seem like a good way of recapitulating the last month in terms of interesting blog posts and articles that came my way. So here's my list for the month of June 2012:

• Latency numbers every programmer should know -- from cache references to intercontinental network latency, some numbers that will help you do those back-of-the-envelope calculations when you need to speed things up in your infrastructure
• Cynic -- test harness by Ruslan Spivak for simulating remote HTTP service behavior, useful when you want to see how your application reacts to various failures when interacting with 3rd party services
• Amazon S3 performance tips and tricks -- some best practices for getting the maximum performance out of S3 from Doug Grismore, Director of Storage Operations at AWS
• How to stop sucking and be awesome instead -- Jeff Atwood advises you to embrace failure, ship often, listen to feedback, and more importantly work on stuff that matters
• Examining file system latency in production (PDF) -- Brendan Gregg from Joyent goes into more detail than you ever wanted regarding disk-level I/O latency vs file system I/O (dtrace is mentioned obviously)
• Openstack in real life -- Paul Guth from Cloudscaling describes that elusive animal: a real life deployment of Openstack (a welcome alternative to the usual press-release-driven development of Openstack)
• Peaches and pecans -- Theo Schlossnagle talks about the balance needed between doing challenging things that you are good at on one hand, and doing things that may seem boring but make you grow in unexpected ways on the other hand
• What Facebook knows -- they pretty much know everything about you, and they want to use it to make money (but then you knew that already)
• ACM Turing Centenary celebration -- Dave Pacheco reviews a celebration that gathered some of the brightest minds in Computer Science; great bits and pieces disseminated throughout this post, such as Ken Thompson's disappointment at the complexity of a modern Linux system
• Embracing risk in career decisions -- it boils down to 'listen to your heart'
• Flexible indexing in Hadoop via Elephant Twin -- Dmitriy Ryabov from Twitter talks about a new tool that can be used to create indexes in Hadoop in order to speed up queries (and can also be integrated with Pig)
• The interesting thing about cutting costs -- just an example of the mind-boggling posts that Simon Wardley consistently comes up with; I highly recommend his blog for those of you interested in long-term business and technology strategy and vision
• Building websites with science -- another great post from Etsy regarding good and bad ways to do data science, and some caveats regarding A/B testing
• 100 most influential programming books -- a good list from Stack Overflow; curious if there's anybody who read all of them?
• Building resilient user experiences -- another gem from Mike Brittain at Etsy on how to offer a good user experience even in the face of backend errors; your mantra should be 'never say no to your customers money'
• Nobody ever got fired for using Hadoop on a cluster (PDF) -- interesting point of view from a team at Microsoft Research on how many 'Big Data' datasets can actually fit in (generous amounts of) RAM and how this can impact the architecture of your data analytics infrastructure
• 9 beliefs of remarkably successful people -- I usually don't like lists of '10 things that will change your life' but this one is pretty good