"simplicity" entries

Top Stories: April 23-27, 2012

Gracefully failing websites, big data in Europe, and why simple code matters.

This week on O'Reilly: Etsy's Mike Brittain explained how to allow for graceful website failures, the organizers of Big Data Week examined Europe's data scene, and author Max Kanat-Alexander discussed the considerable benefits of simple code.

Complexity fails: A lesson from storage simplification

Storage architectures show simplicity's power and how to build clouds at scale.

Simple systems scale effectively, while complex systems struggle to overcome the multiplicative effect of potential failure points. This shows us why the most reliable and scalable clouds are those made up of fewer, simpler parts.

Dennis Ritchie's legacy of elegantly useful tools

We need more people who share Dennis Ritchie's spirit.

"UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity," Dennis Ritchie once said. It's true, and we need more geniuses who share his spirit.