Quoted: We do very little to encourage people to understand the properties of their algorithms before they start coding. Generally this is a much bigger problem than any machine level anomalies you might encounter. The “real costs” people need to know are more often at a much higher level than the machine.

Bloom filters have been extremely useful in a number of problems I've worked on; I haven't watched this yet but I'm sure there are some interesting nuggets.

Quoted: A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Quoted: If your six nines system goes down mysteriously just once and it takes you an hour to figure out the cause and fix it, well, you've just blown your downtime budget for the next century. Even the most notoriously reliable systems, like AT&T's long distance service, have had long outages (six hours in 1991) which put them at a rather embarrassing three nines ... and AT&T's long distance service is considered "carrier grade," the gold standard for uptime.

Redot from Mohit. CMU ;)

Quoted: Many people think of Operations as "a bunch of boring work... which I'm hoping someone else is doing." It often takes less time to set up a development environment than the tools and infrastructure needed to test, deploy, monitor, and scale new software. The survival of most projects depend on working software, at least initially, and so if there is money or time many people will spend it on development. Unfortunately, people say they will "figure that ops stuff out soon", but what they mean is "when we're totally screwed!!!" It doesn't have to be that way...

Some interesting points from Martin Fowler a few years ago on XP, patterns, design, etc. Was worth skimming through quickly.

Quoted: "enabling practices of continuous integration, testing, and refactoring, provide a new environment that makes evolutionary design plausible"

Quoted: "don't want to spend effort adding new capability that won't be needed until a future iteration. And even if the cost is zero, you still don't want to it because it increases the cost of modification even if it costs nothing to put in."

Quoted: " * Invest time in learning about patterns
* Concentrate on when to apply the pattern (not too early)
* Concentrate on how to implement the pattern in its simplest form first, then add complexity later.
* If you put a pattern in, and later realize that it isn't pulling its weight - don't be afraid to take it out again."

Quoted: "First keep in mind what you're drawing the diagrams for. The primary value is communication. Effective communication means selecting important things and neglecting the less important.
* keep them short
* don't try to address all the details (just the important ones)
* treat the resulting design as a sketch, not as a final design
"

Jason M. recently forwarded this around again, good to quickly re-read.