OCaml mimicry in Java
Yaron Minsky from Jane Street gave a great talk on OCaml that serves as a good introduction for someone who is accustomed to Java. In particular, »
The Inflatable Transpose Tree: a highly compact data structure
In honour of Claude Shannon's 100th birthday, I want to tell you about two ideas I had for storing data efficiently. These ideas are pretty nifty »
A Day in the Life of a Vena Engineer
Hi, my name is Mustafa Haddara, and I'm a Software Developer at Vena. We build a multidimensional database (aka OLAP Cube; the wikipedia article is pretty »
The Vena Internship Experience
I still remember applying to Vena like it was yesterday, a simple task that has changed my life forever. As a first year student who has »
Using Jackson for your REST service? Don't initialize your entities
Using a Java framework like Dropwizard and an ORM like Hibernate, it's quite easy to write a REST server in a completely object-oriented way. By defining »
Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication
One of the great things about Python is its built-in support for functional programming where you can pass anonymous functions to other functions at runtime. This »
RabbitMQ Gotchas
When you're running a cloud service like we do here at Vena, uptime is very important. We run blue-green deployments and we strive to make all »
Malloc envy
Folks using programming languages with automatic garbage collection (GC) often feel that it's a price worth paying. I disagree: outside of some fairly limited circumstances, there's »
Unexpected Iterations
Here at Vena, we build a multidimensional database (also known as an OLAP Cube, or simply "The Cube") for our customers to store and analyze their »
Deploying OSSEC at scale
As part of a general effort to improve the security of our infrastructure, all of our AWS instances now have OSSEC installed on them to provide »