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A bad choice of title, as "postmortem" made me think there was some severe outage caused by jemalloc.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
chrisweekly 1y ago
Well, that's not the only meaning of "postmortem". The fine article does open with, "The jemalloc memory allocator was first conceived in early 2004, and has been in public use for about 20 years now. Thanks to the nature of open source software licensing, jemalloc will remain publicly available indefinitely. But active upstream development has come to an end. This post briefly describes jemalloc’s development phases, each with some success/failure highlights, followed by some retrospective commentary."
stingraycharles 1y ago
I think this implies your understanding of the term “post-mortem” is incorrect, rather than the title.
- drysine 1y ago
  Or maybe not
runevault 1y ago
postmortem is looking back after an event. That can be a security event/outage, it can also be the completion of a project (see: game studios often do postmortems once their game is out to look back on what went wrong and right between preproduction, production, and post launch).
- gilgoomesh 1y ago
  It's weird that we use "postmortem" in those cases since the word literally means "after death"; kind of implying something bad happened. I get that most of these postmortems are done after major development ceases, so it kind of is "dead" but still. Surely a "retrospective" would be a better word for a look back. It even means "look back.
  - simonask 1y ago
    It gets even better. Some companies use "mid-mortems", which are evaluation and reflection processes in the middle of a project...
    - meepmorp 1y ago
      sounds like an appropriate way to talk about death march projects, tbh
bmacho 1y ago
The last part is unfortunate. However, it is a perfectly fine choice of title, as it does not make the majority of us think that there were an outage caused by jemalloc. You should update how you think of the word, and align it with the majority usage

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Well, that's not the only meaning of "postmortem". The fine article does open with, "The jemalloc memory allocator was first conceived in early 2004, and has been in public use for about 20 years now. Thanks to the nature of open source software licensing, jemalloc will remain publicly available indefinitely. But active upstream development has come to an end. This post briefly describes jemalloc’s development phases, each with some success/failure highlights, followed by some retrospective commentary."

stingraycharles 1y ago

I think this implies your understanding of the term “post-mortem” is incorrect, rather than the title.

drysine 1y ago
Or maybe not

runevault 1y ago

postmortem is looking back after an event. That can be a security event/outage, it can also be the completion of a project (see: game studios often do postmortems once their game is out to look back on what went wrong and right between preproduction, production, and post launch).

gilgoomesh 1y ago
It's weird that we use "postmortem" in those cases since the word literally means "after death"; kind of implying something bad happened. I get that most of these postmortems are done after major development ceases, so it kind of is "dead" but still. Surely a "retrospective" would be a better word for a look back. It even means "look back.
- simonask 1y ago
  It gets even better. Some companies use "mid-mortems", which are evaluation and reflection processes in the middle of a project...
  - meepmorp 1y ago
    sounds like an appropriate way to talk about death march projects, tbh

bmacho 1y ago

The last part is unfortunate. However, it is a perfectly fine choice of title, as it does not make the majority of us think that there were an outage caused by jemalloc. You should update how you think of the word, and align it with the majority usage