The reactive manifesto

Working in financial front-office since several years from now, I'm used to build reactive systems. 

In a nutshell, they are systems that are ready to respond to stimuli (whether market data updates, client requests for prices, spreads modifications, position changes, etc), in order to react as quick as possible (in milliseconds or less), in a world where you must constantly protect you against waves or throughput peaks of data coming into your systems.

To achieve that, we mostly build systems that are event-driven, stream-oriented, scalable (vertically, but also horizontally), performant (with conflation enabled, GC-less strategies, ...), and resilient (i.e. recovery-oriented & production ready).

Today, one of my mate showed me this new reactive manifesto which is all about that kind of systems we used to build. I found it very readable and informative. Check this out by yourself:

http://www.reactivemanifesto.org 

And welcome to our reactive world!

Understandability Driven Development

Thought you knew every kind of possible ...DD?

You should probably read the excellent white paper explaining Raft: the new clustering distributed machines consensus algorithm recently invented in Stanford to add a new one (UDD ;-)

Except a few things, their article is very clear and informative. But what I really like more than everything else is their approach. Indeed, they elaborate their algorithm with understandability as a core driver. The idea was to make possible for a large audience, to understand their algorithm comfortably.

Always interested by the challenge of how to deliver durable solutions and even if we are talking about an algorithm here (and not implementation), this is the first time I'm reading someone explaining that understandability is not a nice to have ... but a must have.

Pretty cool!

Update (July, 26th 2013):

• About the ‘why’: https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/wiki/download/attachments/3703006/SEDCL_forum_2013_raft.pdf
• About the ‘how’: http://raftuserstudy.s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/study/raft.pdf