What Time Is It? A Guide to Time for Software Developers with George-Neville Neil

July 30, 2015

Most software developers never have to think about time in their programs, unless they are working on some form of real-time system. As distributed systems have become pervasive, whether as a Hadoop cluster or as services running semi-autonomously within geographically distributed co-location facilities, the illusion that time doesn't matter has come to an end.

Programmers working on all kinds of software now need to understand at least the basics of computer based timekeeping in order to keep their deployed systems running smoothly as well as making any sense of the telemetry returned from their software. In this talk we'll cover both the basics of computer-based timekeeping, including what makes it difficult, what can be expected from commodity systems, and where we are with efforts to improve the state of the art.

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George Neville-Neil

George Neville-Neil works on networking and operating system code for fun and profit. He also teaches various courses on subjects related to computer programming. His professional areas of interest include code spelunking, operating systems, networking, time and security. He is the co-author with Marshall Kirk McKusick and Robert Watson of The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System and is the columnist behind ACM Queue's "Kode Vicious." Mr. Neville-Neil earned his bachelor's degree in computer science at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. He is a member of the ACM (where he is Chair of the Practitioner Board), the Usenix Association, and the IEEE.