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Tiny overly excited explainer about vector search
Random thing that I got excited about this morning because I wanted to add really nice search to my personal journal: vector embeddings. Imagine a 3D Cartesian space, and in it there are words at various (x, y, z) points. Similar words are placed in similar locations. In this space, “king” and “queen” would be…
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Tests are an observability concern
The first thing I do when I encounter a strange code base is run the test suite. I do this because I can get an idea of: I’ve heard a lot about the benefits of test suites, even in the context of articles that are against TDD (test-driven development). For instance: And conversely, the negatives:…
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Implementing the Raft Consensus Algorithm with David Beazley
I survived David Beazley’s weeklong course on the Raft consensus algorithm that powers technologies like Kubernetes, MongoDB, and Neo4j. Image from https://raft.github.io/ The Raft Consensus Algorithm is a way for a gaggle of computers to agree on a sequence of events, or a “log” of events. Raft is useful for things like databases – once…
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Staff Engineer by Will Larson
Staff Engineer by Will Larson talks about what happens in your career should you decide to progress past Senior Engineer. For context, software engineers typically progress through a series of well known levels: junior, mid (or just “engineer”), and senior. All of these levels are characterized by increasing autonomy and impact: Title Autonomy Impact Junior…
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A random assortment of Rust notes
I thought I’d jot down some notes about using Rust that wouldn’t have made it as their own blog posts: You can’t use anonymous functions for control flow In Ruby, you can return from almost anywhere in a function: Unfortunately, it also returns nonsense if the inputs break the invariant that an even number exists…
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One of my favorite Rust features (doc comments!)
I realized that one of my favorite Rust features doesn’t have a blog post highlighting it [0], so I thought I’d talk a bit about documentation comments and doc tests in Rust. I’ll give you a quick example. Let’s say you have some code: There’s a cargo command to generate documentation from that code: Which…
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Public school is a bad deal for us
Actually, that really understates the problem – we feel that living in the USA is a bad deal for families in general, but for now I’ll focus specifically on public school and daycare. My wife and I were taking a stroll around the neighborhood with our three kids during the week when I realized –…
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Professional Rustacean, 3 months in
Hi! 👋 I did end up landing that Rust job I was looking for, and I’ve been wrestling with the Rust programming language now for a good couple of months – not quite 3, if I’m to be honest, but who’s counting. To be honest, I’m a little bit ambivalent. I think it’s a great…
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AI morality
I cobbled this together from a few comments I’d made on Facebook – please forgive the lack of coherency. Is it moral to ask AI art program to create something “in the style of” a living artist? Is it moral to ask an AI art program to create something in between styles of two artists?…
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Fun with Gleam
This’ll be a short blog post, but Gleam (v0.25.0) is an Erlang OTP language, akin to Elixir (in fact, recently added full compatibility with Elixir packages). It’s been fun so far. I think the error messages are great and the functional style language is a lot of fun to wrap my brain around. I have…