Ben Schofield

Dev at AWS, working on Hydro

[Marc Bowes @marcbowes]

The Aurora DSQL team have been crushing it, bunch of really great features have come out recently..

[Joe Sluis @jyobo10]

Got recommended this paper after reading the Aurora DSQL paper so I'll be reading this next

only 13 pages if you want to read along!

[Alex Miller @AlexMillerDB]

[arXiv] Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP
https://t.co/WPWOxtcTxn

It's a DSQL paper, hot off the presses! Query processing in firecracker! Erasure coding on logs! The origin story of the turmoil crate! All cool stuff!

Can't sneak an arXiv upload past me, Marc. :p

[Ben Schofield @benjscho]

@2357_takeshi EF Core is now available for DSQL: https://t.co/xXUFLAmFxU

[Ben Schofield @benjscho]

@maroon1st Check out this blog from Marc Bowes on how it works: https://t.co/GTReJTK7dV

[Ben Schofield @benjscho]

Trying to teach something is also a great way to get things to stick. Early on I wrote up a summary after reading papers, it's something I need to get back into the habit of doing: https://t.co/XlwfR8uSfH

[Ben Schofield @benjscho]

Love this!

I've been running a distributed systems reading group for the last two years at Amazon, its been incredibly rewarding to do. Regularly reading papers is a great way to expand your own knowledge and doing it as part of a group is the best way to stay consistent.

[Joe Sluis @jyobo10]

If you're trying to learn about databases, distributed systems, etc, it can be really helpful to discuss papers with other people

I've been attending a systems reading group for the last few months, and I've found that discussing a paper with others hammers it into my brain way more than reading it alone

If you're into this kind of stuff, I'd definitely recommend finding (or starting) a small reading group

(also this article is how I discovered the systems reading group at Microsoft)

[Ben Schofield @benjscho]

@jyobo10 For sure! The slack channel is distributed-computing-reading-group, similar to the Microsoft group there's hot and cold periods but the group itself is pretty large. I initially joined when it was run by the fantastic @muratdemirbas

[Ben Schofield @benjscho]

It's like the worst game of pulling on threads there is to play. Every thing needs another thing.

I know nix is right there but I refuse to learn it yet

[Ben Schofield @benjscho]

New dev machine setup has to be one of my least favorite things.

[Ben Schofield @benjscho]

@mastra Nice! By the way, JSON is supported as a column type now.

[Ben Schofield @benjscho]

It's really impressive as an engineer how AWS has managed to invest in this over the years and make huge progress. s2n is a great library that secures a huge swath of traffic, and is continuously formally verified: https://t.co/Jv2dqS4gvg

[Ben Schofield @benjscho]

This is a really fun time to be interested in formal verification & automated reasoning. The ideas are becoming more and more relevant.

Lets talk about provably secure software!

[Joe Weisenthal @TheStalwart]

Cybersecurity is something I’ve literally never spent much time learning about. And probably I should change that. But I’m curious, is there such thing as provably secure software, or is security always relative to state of the art hacking technology?

[Ben Schofield @benjscho]

You invest in the foundations first and then build up. It starts with primitives, how do we make sure the communications between systems are secure and bug free.

[Ben Schofield @benjscho]

@TheStalwart Theoretically yes! Practically (so far) no.