Devon O'Dell

Software Engineer

Devon H. O'Dell is a software engineer at Fastly, where he contributes primarily to the performance and debugging of low-level systems. Prior to Fastly, Devon was Lead Software Architect at Message Systems, and contributed heavily to the Momentum high-performance messaging platform. His experience over the last 15 years ranges from web applications to embedded systems firmware (and most areas in-between). His primary technical interests are developing and debugging high-performance, concurrent network systems software and related tools.

Surrogate Keys: Part 2

Devon O'Dell

One of my favorite computer science jokes is that there are only two truly difficult problems in computer science: naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors. At Fastly, we deal with these sorts of difficult problems every day. In our previous post on surrogate keys, we discussed how this feature can help you solve the problem of invalidating dynamic content. In this post, we’ll take a look under the hood at how we efficiently represented this system.

July 30, 2013

Performance

Engineering