Cache Invalidation

July 28th, 2010
programming, tech
A well known aphorism attributed to Phil Karlton is:

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

I realized yesterday that this is really only one hard problem: much of the reason that naming things is hard is that changing names is hard, so you'd better name something right the first time. Why is it hard to rename things? Poor cache invalidation.

Comment via: facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Linkpost for July

Effective Altruism

via Thing of Things July 3, 2026

Agentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes on agentic coding from Galapagos Island

I've been using AI fairly heavily since last November and the whole thing is a funny experience. An agent will do something that, if a human did it, you'd immediately fire them. My reaction, of course, is to act as if this is great and spin up a t…

via Posts on July 3, 2026

Variable fonts aren't universally supported

I make a lot of webpages. I also use Lockdown Mode on iOS and MacOS for a bit of extra security. Sometimes I realize that I forgot to test on Safari and it looks like crap, or I test and don’t notice that there’s been a problem for months (as was the case…

via Home June 27, 2026

more     (via openring)