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Articles by Terry Coatta
To Catch a Failure: The Record-and-Replay Approach to Debugging
Current Issue Past Issues Topics The January/February 2020 issue of acmqueue is out now Subscribers and ACM Professional members login here Debugging PDF March 28, 2020 Volume 18, issue 1 Case Study A discussion with Robert O'Callahan, Kyle Huey, Devon O'Dell, and Terry Coatta When work began at Mozilla on the record-and-replay debugging tool called rr, the goal was to produce a practical, cost-effective, resource-efficient means for capturing low-frequency nondeterministic test failures in...
CodeFlow: Improving the Code Review Process at Microsoft
The September/October issue of acmqueue is out now Subscribers and ACM Professional members login here PDF November 13, 2018 Volume 16, issue 5 CodeFlow: Improving the Code Review Process at Microsoft A discussion with Jacek Czerwonka, Michaela Greiler, Christian Bird, Lucas Panjer, and Terry Coatta You may be wondering, "Code review process? Isn't that obvious?" But code reviews are pervasive. Any developer is likely to be asked at any time to review someone else's code.
Hootsuite: In Pursuit of Reactive Systems
Based in Vancouver, Canada, Hootsuite is the most widely used SaaS (software as a service) platform for managing social media. Since its humble beginnings in 2008, Hootsuite has grown into a billion-dollar company with more than 15 million users around the globe. As Hootsuite evolved over the years, so did the technology stack. A key change was moving from LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) to microservices. A shift to microservices didn't come without its challenges, however.
Automated QA Testing at EA: Driven by Events
To millions of game geeks, the position of QA (quality assurance) tester at Electronic Arts must seem like a dream job. But from the company's perspective, the overhead associated with QA can look downright frightening, particularly in an era of massively multiplayer games. Hence the appeal of automated QA testing, which has the potential to be faster, more cost-effective, more efficient, and more scalable than manual testing.
React: Facebook's Functional Turn on Writing JavaScript
One of the long-standing ironies of user-friendly JavaScript front ends is that building them typically involved trudging through the DOM (Document Object Model), hardly known for its friendliness to developers. But now developers have a way to avoid directly interacting with the DOM, thanks to Facebook's decision to open-source its React library for the construction of user interface components.
Corba: Gone but (Hopefully) Not Forgotten
Back in the June 2006 issue of Queue, Michi Henning wrote a very good condensed history of CORBA and discussed how some of its technical limitations contributed to its downfall.
From Here to There, the SOA Way
Back in ancient times, say, around the mid '80s when I was a grad student, distributed systems research was in its heyday. Systems like Trellis/Owl and Eden/Emerald were exploring issues in object-oriented language design, persistence, and distributed computing. One of the big themes to come out of that time period was location transparencythe idea that the way that you access an object should be independent of where it is located.
Traipsing Through the QA Tools Desert
The Jeremiahs of the software world are out there lamenting, “Software is buggy and insecure!” Like the biblical prophet who bemoaned the wickedness of his people, these malcontents tell us we must repent and change our ways. But as someone involved in building commercial software, I’m thinking to myself, “I don’t need to repent. I do care about software quality.” Even so, I know that I have transgressed. I have shipped software that has bugs in it. Why did I do it?
Things I Learned in School
How many of us have not had the experience of sitting in a classroom wondering idly: "Is this really going to matter out in the real world?" It's curious, and in no small amount humbling, to realize how many of those nuggets of knowledge really do matter. One cropped up recently for me: the Finite State Machine (FSM). To set the context for how the FSM changed my life -- well, at least made developing software easier for me -- I need to digress somewhat.
Node at LinkedIn: The Pursuit of Thinner, Lighter, Faster
Node.js, the server-side JavaScript-based software platform used to build scalable network applications, has been all the rage among many developers for the past couple of years, although its popularity has also managed to enrage some others, who have unleashed a barrage of negative blog posts to point out its perceived shortcomings. Still, while new and untested, Node continues to win more converts. In 2011 LinkedIn joined the movement when it opted to rebuild its core mobile services in Node.
A Conversation with Erik Meijer and Jose Blakeley
In any discussion about ORM (object-relational mapping), Microsoft’s approach is inevitably a part of the conversation. With LINQ (language-integrated query) and the Entity Framework, Microsoft divided its traditional ORM technology into two parts: one part that handles querying (LINQ) and one part that handles mapping (Entity Framework).
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