Automating the Blue Prince Parlor Puzzle
This is a continuation of last week's post. Please read that one first! In that post, we built an engine that could take puzzles of the following form: blue:...
Propositional Parlor Puzzle
I've recently been playing Blue Prince, which is a great time if you are a fan of puzzle games like Return of the Obra Dinn or Outer Wilds and also a fan of...
Parsing is Search
Something I didn't appreciate for a while (despite the term backtracking being prevalent in both cases) was the extent to which parsing is a search problem....
Feedback Ch 5 6
I am tired. I have been travelling and sick and oncall for the past couple weeks. I hope you're all having a good time. I have been thinking lately about the...
Key(anti)chains
This week I was supposed to write about chapters 5 and 6 of the feedback control book but I had a busy week and so wanted to talk about something a bit more...
It's Time to Stop Building KV Databases
I'm so sick of Key-Value. The most unopinionated, uninspired data model that is a pain to use for anything. They're very popular! Among database vendors. Or,...
Chapter 3 & 4 of Feedback Control
We are reading Feedback Control for Computer Systems: Introducing Control Theory to Enterprise Programmers by Philipp K. Janert. For discussion, please see...
Philosophy and Methodology of Experiments
Sometimes you have to do an experiment. This is rote, manual work that is chiefly concerned with data collection. I'm mostly talking about performance...
Chapters 1 & 2 of Feedback Control
Hello! I hope you all had a good weekend. This is the first "study group" issue where I will share thoughts on the first two chapters of Feedback Control for...
More Blind Writes and Merge Operators
Programming Note There is one week left to email me (firstname . lastname at gmail.com, or reply to this email) your thoughts on the first two chapters of...
What if SQL Was Informed by LSMs?
Programming Note: Feedback Control Study Group I'm hosting what I am calling a "study group" about feedback control, loosely backed by Feedback Control for...
Why Feedback Control Interests Me+Discussion Group
I got enough positive interest in some variety of book club that I would like to move forward with that. I want to discuss Feedback Control for Computer...
Are Correctness Conditions Descriptive or Prescriptive?
Please see the bottom of this issue for a programming note! Correctness conditions constrain the sequences of events that are allowed to occur in a system...
Trampolines for SQL
It is CIDR time and that means there is a lot of out-there papers in the world of databases to look at. If you are not familiar, CIDR is the Conference on...
A Review of Extensible Query Optimizers in Practice
My roommate and I are in a war with UPS. I came home the other day to find she’d left this note on our front door: It would appear she also has some kind of...
A Trick That Doesn't Work and a Trick That Does
Ancestry I came across a cool algorithm recently for being able to efficiently answer ancestor queries in a tree ("is x an ancestor of y"). The trick is to...
Channel Sharding in Go
It’s a common pattern in Go to fan out I/O-bound tasks to a bunch of worker Goroutines. We have some big batch of work that has to get done, and we dole it...
Coupled Code is Cool
Happy new year, nothing too deep this week because I am traveling. If you read NULL BITMAP this year you have my gratitude. Peace and love. One of the...
Git Workflow is Snapshot-Isolated
We are apparently continuing our series of posts borne from thinking about Amazon DSQL. Today we are talking about skew. Amy and Bill are two developers...
Why are Things Associative?
The big three algebraic properties that show up in the distributed systems literature are associative, commutativity, and idempotency (EYE-dem-po-ten-see)....
