No matter who you are, life will throw down the gauntlet. It’ll test you. It may even try to break you. Are you a person

Vulnerability is having its moment — we all know it’s cool to break down the emotional wall, to be honest with our feelings. Mostly we assume these to be negative emotions, but it’s just as important to express yourself positively — to love, to laugh, to show joy and excitement.,Yet if you skim through specs of modern NVMe devices you see commodity devices with latencies in the microseconds range and several GB/s of throughput supporting several hundred thousands random IOPS. So where’s the disconnect?,I recall a man I worked with who couldn’t laugh. He’d shut off his emotions at 13 when his mum died and he was scared of “dropping his guard”. When he finally laughed, he looked utterly changed. He said it sounded like a “weird echo” but he couldn’t believe the flood of good vibes it brought with it. Laughing is vulnerability too. If you’re struggling, begin there.,No matter who you are, life will throw down the gauntlet. It’ll test you. It may even try to break you. Are you a person who tosses in the towel too easily? Do you freeze or become emotional? Do you fill up with rage, hold grudges, seek revenge, allow distress or disappointment to lock you in a cage, to narrow your life?,Have you ever watched people engaged in activities they feel passionate about? It’s as though nothing else exists. If it’s an art or show of craft, their focus, attention to detail — and the pride in doing so — gives you chills.,I took a walk with a young client to try to “get” how he felt. At nearly 7 feet (2.1metres) tall, he was quite at home sitting on my couch. But when we hit the packed city street, he cowered. He became awkward and defensive as people stared. I could have guessed this, but it was powerful to witness it — and gave us more information to work with.,In this article I will demonstrate that while hardware changed dramatically over the past decade, software APIs have not, or at least not enough. Riddled with memory copies, memory allocations, overly optimistic read ahead caching and all sorts of expensive operations, legacy APIs prevent us from making the most of our modern devices.,The way you treat all people who are struggling matters, but it’s particularly telling with those you love and care about. Are you warm and empathetic? Do you take the time to listen? Or do you sit there, feigning empathy, while scrolling your phone and running your To-Do list in your head?,Worse still, society teaches that the pursuit of happiness isn’t really a pursuit at all. It’s a commodity. Look at any advertisement (and they’re not hard to find). What are they selling? It’s not a product or service. Not really. It’s what that product or service can get you — they’re really selling us happiness.,Not just restaurants, of course, this is code for how you treat people who are employed to serve or help you. What’s your style? Are you loud and obnoxious in getting what you want? Impatient? Flirtatious? Passive-aggressive? Do you use basic manners? Do you treat people with respect, even when you are paying for service. Play this one however you want, but know you are broadcasting who you are in neon lights.,As I reflected about the causes of this disconnect I realized that a large part of the reason for the persistence of such misconceptions is that if they were to spend the time to validate their assumptions with benchmarks, the data would show that their assumptions are, or at least appear to be, true.,We express vitality and confidence (or lack) of it, in the way we move. But here’s the cool thing. We don’t have to wait until we’re confident to change our posture — we can do it the other way around.,Here’s a test. Describe your “look” in a few words. Do you like what you’ve come up with? Does it feel like a fit? If so, great. If not, consider what you’d like to express outwardly. There are a million ways to tweak your look, from haircut to shoes to textures to jewellery to body art to splashes or clashes of colour. You don’t have to spend a fortune, either: throw out the rules and put your own stamp on you. This is your story.,How do you engage in your favourite things? If you were watching yourself, what would you see? And do you like what you see? Here’s a clue: even if you don’t have a “passion” bring your whole self to whatever you are doing. You’ll get far more pleasure out of it.,“If we split this into multiple files it will be slow because it will generate random I/O patterns. We need to optimize this for sequential access and read from a single file”