Top all-time · #277
Ilya Grigorik
Personal blog · igvita.com · on HN as igrigorikwebprogrammingsystems
Ilya Grigorik's personal blog at igvita.com covers web, programming and systems. Since 2007, 177 different Hacker News readers have linked it 339 times, most often “Minimum Viable Block Chain”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Sometimes recommended · 9 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Ilya Grigorik's blog for clear, practical writing on web networking and performance (TLS, HTTP/2, latency) and for his minimum viable blockchain primer.
- Recommended for · 9 comments
- Commenters call the Minimum Viable Blockchain post the best introduction to blockchain, call the blog one of the most inspiring Ruby, AI and general technical b
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Distinguished Engineer and Technical Advisor to the CEO at Shopify, on a mission to make commerce better for everyone.
Most-linked posts?
- Minimum Viable Block Chain16 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2014-05-17
- SVD Recommendation System in Ruby9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2008-04-26
- Let's Make GitHub Better, Together7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2009-06-05
- LevelDB: SSTable and Log-Structured Storage (2012)5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-01-14
- The "Average Page" is a myth5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-01-12
- Nginx and Memcached, an easy 400% boost in req/s4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2008-02-11
- Tokyo Cabinet DB: Beyond Key-Value Store4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2009-02-13
- Control Groups (cgroups) for the Web?4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-03-01
- Server-Sent Event Notifications with HTML5 & Goliath3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-08-26
- Debunking Responsive CSS Performance Myths - igvita.com3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-06-14
What Hacker News says?
No, it was not just JS. They were the first to do a ton of other optimizations such as prefetching. https://www.igvita.com/2012/06/04/chrome-networking-dns-pref...
Comment linking /2012/06/04/chrome-networking-dns-prefetch-and-tcp-preconnect/
on “But what if I want a faster horse?”Submitted Chrome DevTools could do that? as a story · 514 points
HN discussion"Did you implement a storage pattern that was ordered by key (or hash(key) if you used hashing)?" Well, I didn't implement it, Jeff Dean did, but yes, that's what we used for a lot of features. https://www.quora.com/What-is-an-SSTable-in-Googles-internal... https://www.igvita.com/2012/02/06/sstable-and-log-structured...
Comment linking /2012/02/06/sstable-and-log-structured-storage-leveldb/
on “SQL: One of the most valuable skills”Submitted Minimum Viable Block Chain as a story · 335 points
HN discussionThis was posted before , but IMO is very well written:- https://www.igvita.com/2014/05/05/minimum-viable-block-chain...
Comment linking /2014/05/05/minimum-viable-block-chain/
on “Blockchain Demo [video]”Submitted Script-injected "async scripts" considered harmful as a story · 235 points
HN discussionHere are the ones in my reader, admittedly I haven't visited often enough over the past couple of months: http://www.igvita.com/ http://ejohn.org/ http://codingrelic.geekhold.com/ (Denny covers assembly and networking issues often in great detail) http://buhrmi.tumblr.com/ http://elegantcode.com/ http://72lions.com/ http://kellabyte.com/ (mobile-ish dev) http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ http://ihumanable.com/blog htt…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you read daily?”Submitted High Performance Networking in Google Chrome as a story · 216 points
HN discussionI like this one. https://www.igvita.com/
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on “Ask HN: What are the best personal project websites you've seen?”Submitted Your Chrome browser might not be using HTTP anymore as a story · 214 points
HN discussionI have a writeup on some of the chrome network internals here: http://www.igvita.com/2012/06/04/chrome-networking-dns-prefe... As you found in the code above.. the idea is simply to complete the TCP handshake and keep the connection idle until the request is ready to be dispatched. Doing so allows Chrome to shave off one RTT (TCP handshake) of latency.
Comment linking /2012/06/04/chrome-networking-dns-prefetch-and-tcp-preconnect/
on “Chrome DevTools could do that?”Submitted Life beyond HTTP 1.1: Google’s SPDY as a story · 204 points
HN discussionOn slide 27 [1] it's shown that I can customize colors of Elements pane. It's possible to customize Sources panel? Would be cool to have solarized theme here. [1] http://www.igvita.com/slides/2012/devtools-tips-and-tricks/#...
Comment linking /slides/2012/devtools-tips-and-tricks/
on “Chrome DevTools could do that?”Submitted Building a Modern Web Stack for the Real-time Web as a story · 169 points
HN discussionRemote debugging is so useful: http://www.igvita.com/slides/2012/devtools-tips-and-tricks/#... . It is painful to try and make and test changes on mobile devices without developer tools. I wonder when this will be available for iOS.
Comment linking /slides/2012/devtools-tips-and-tricks/
on “Chrome DevTools could do that?”Submitted Goliath: Non-blocking, Ruby 1.9 Web Server as a story · 167 points
HN discussion> This is improving, however – see e.g. http://www.igvita.com/2013/10/24/optimizing-tls-record-size-... That's interesting (and I'll try to apply it where i'm running SSL), but what I'm more worried about is the very beginning of the connection. http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000545/ch04.htm... SSL adds two extra round trips, which doubles the latency of a small request. This is really unfortunate when…
Comment linking /2013/10/24/optimizing-tls-record-size-and-buffering-latency/
on “Moving forward on improving HTTP's security”Submitted Protocol Buffers, Avro, Thrift & MessagePack as a story · 135 points
HN discussion> SSL has a significant number of required packet exchanges at startup This is improving, however – see e.g. http://www.igvita.com/2013/10/24/optimizing-tls-record-size-... > SSL blocks proxy caching This is only true for involuntary transparent proxying, which is also a huge source of reliability problems. After seeing how many times JavaScript is broken or images are degraded by "helpful" ISPs I'm quite happy to c…
Comment linking /2013/10/24/optimizing-tls-record-size-and-buffering-latency/
on “Moving forward on improving HTTP's security”Submitted Tokyo Cabinet DB: Beyond Key-Value Store as a story · 135 points
HN discussionCool! Quick back-of-the-napkin indicates that the RTT for LEO satellites (at the upper bound) would be only ~4.7% of the RTT for GEO satellites. I'm sure there's much more to the story that I'm missing, but an LEO satellite should have a latency of around 11.75ms. In 2012, average US latency to Google was ~50-60ms [1]. Would bandwidth be the limiting factor? [1] https://www.igvita.com/2012/07/19/latency-the-new-web-…
Comment linking /2012/07/19/latency-the-new-web-performance-bottleneck/
on “Google Nears $1 Billion Investment in SpaceX”Submitted Optimizing Nginx TLS Time To First Byte as a story · 131 points
HN discussionthere are these kinds of people for one ilya grigorik http://igvita.com
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on “Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a super-productive programmer (2011)”Submitted ZeroMQ: Modern & Fast Networking Stack as a story · 128 points
HN discussionI don't understand. RecordIO doesn't support lookup of any kind; it is a linear format. The interface of Riegeli looks to me exactly like the interface to RecordIO. All they've done is removed support for Google's abstract File* storage interface so it can be used by the public. What you are describing sounds like SSTable. Perhaps you could benefit from LevelDB. https://www.igvita.com/2012/02/06/sstable-and-log-stru…
Comment linking /2012/02/06/sstable-and-log-structured-storage-leveldb/
on “Xg2xg: Lookup table of similar tech and services for ex-Googlers”Submitted VMware CloudFoundry: Ruby powered PaaS as a story · 85 points
HN discussionHell yeah, Ilya Grigorik. https://www.igvita.com/archives "A word to the wise is sufficient." When he speaks, it's quite often relevant at a quantum level beyond your average tech post or presentation.
Comment linking /archives
on “HTTP/2 all the things”Submitted Control Groups (cgroups) for the Web? as a story · 84 points
HN discussionAntirez mentions that a limited set of on-disk data structures could work well but that it will take one or two years to even reach the drawing board. Fair enough -- Redis is first and foremost an in-memory database. If there was the time though, I'd love to see LevelDB[1] merge the gap between in-memory and on-disk. Inspired by Google's BigTable, all keys are kept sorted on disk (see: SSTable[2]). Keys, lists, sets…
Comment linking /2012/02/06/sstable-and-log-structured-storage-leveldb/
on “Redis persistence demystified”Submitted Building Fast and Resilient Web Applications as a story · 84 points
HN discussion
