I'll get down-voted -- correctly -- for saying something that adds nothing to the conversation, but YES! I think spending my childhood watching Lucas Walencheck was part of my inspiration to learn programming.
People who go into humanities don't expect to make a million dollars. Research like this verifies common assumptions, but to me they always have a sunspot study feel to them.
I'm similar. I used to always listen to music while coding, but over time I realized for a lot of work, it really is a bad distraction. The only time I really listen to music while working now is for parts that are mostly the coding equivalent of manual labor. When I do -- if I need the energy -- I usually listen to http://di.fm/
This is a great paper. If you haven't read it, it suggests a common scenario where endemic network delays tend to nudge all participants in a periodic broadcast protocol to send their broadcasts at the same time, so that some hours after you start all the participants, everyone has synchronized and on a timer saturates the network with updates.
The solution (I didn't reread so this is from memory) is to add random jitter to each participant's timer.
However, is there evidence to suggest that's what happened to Amazon? I can see this being a big issue in '93 with high-latency low-bandwidth links a commonplace. But we think that Amazon wasn't engineered well enough to deal with multiple orders of magnitude spikes in C&C traffic?
Thank you, though, for posting a (much needed) technical comment to this discussion.
I don't think it was a symptom of routing synchronization specifically, but I'd be curious to know if it was a case of unexpected and undesired synchronization. (E.G. An independent and random cluster of blocks suddenly updated; the network was saturated; it pulled in more updates; ...)
And yes, the paper talked about randomization. It also pointed out the magnitude of randomization required was larger than expected.
It's been my experience that trying to find a good person to work with is like dating. If you're actively trying to find someone, you seem to have less luck than if you're not trying to find someone and you often settle for something less than great.
My advice is to go find find some open source projects that tackle a problem you find interesting and contribute. In the process of working on open source projects, you'll find people that you can work with well. They might be useful in the future.
