Life After Big IT
There’s a story I tell candidates during their interviews, that embodies the spirit of Vena. Shortly after I left a big IT firm to join »
So, Patrick, how was your long weekend?
I took this past Monday as a vacation day. Upon returning, I sent this email to the team, and they suggested I post it here. Upon »
Help! I invented an algorithm and I don't know how it works
This past weekend, I needed to find a good fraction to approximate a given value. Along the way, I learned about continued fractions, and emerged with »
Three Month Anniversary
It was the morning of Test Friday and I had just witnessed an accident at Dundas and Bloor. “This is a great sign,” I said under »
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 »