ELS: latency based load balancer

You might have noticed that the Spotify back-end has been faster by about 0.47 milliseconds in the last 6 months. Read about my new algorithm in two posts:

1. The first one is simpler, has a lot of pictures, graphs and even three animations.
2. The second one has all the necessary math.

Underflow bug

Sometimes code needs to be executed 100 000 000 000 000 (100 trillion) times to hit a bug. Read my blog post for Spotify to learn more.

As usual, Reddit users were there to brighten my day:

• "Really surprised such a successful tech company produced such shoddy code."
• "This is remarkably shitty code. I would criticize pretty harshly anyone who wrote it. I would fire anyone who wrote a public blog post about it exactly like this post."
• "So basic edge case failure. Not even a corner case."
• "Yeah, not surprised that someone that thinks they invented the term underflow and used it wrongly got something like this wrong."
• "[the code] is, pretty obviously, broken at a glance"

How to shuffle songs? – A blog post I wrote for Spotify

I improved Spotify's shuffling algorithm and wrote a blog post about it. Enjoy!