The Case for a Logarithmic Performance Metric
Traditional comparisons of benchmark results focus on percentage differences. While seemingly simple to understand and compute, such comparisons pose a number of problems that are solved »
Measuring information in millibytes
A thousandth of one byte. Does such a thing even exist? Yep, it does. I've used them before. How to debug an optimizing compiler Suppose you »
Fun with DNS
At Vena we've been recently engaged in an effort to upgrade our servers to take advantage of AWS's Autoscaling and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) services, the »
Gotcha! Cartesian products of Java 8 streams
Occasionally, you need to compute the Cartesian product of several sets. Java 8 Streams make this simple, clear, elegant... and extravagantly expensive. I've created a Cartesian »
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 »