Alan's Lair

Latest — Oct 28, 2021

Consistent Hashing for Dummies

Today I'll discuss about an interesting concept: consistent hashing. It's a widely employed technique to properly perform sharding in distributed storage systems. I'm not aiming at a rigorous explanation (please don't use the raw snippets I provide in production code!), but I hope I can make the concept simple enough.

More issues

The curse of the downvote

I don't have strong opinions on Facebook - I'm not even a user anymore - but I think that the "like/dislike" mania is going a bit too far. I've read yesterday that an engineer was fired from Facebook for having a YouTube channel, but that's beyond the scope of

Machine Learning: a sound primer

How to start with machine learning? Some serious, yet practical, suggestions.

Standalone, single-file, editable Python scripts WITH DEPENDENCIES

How badly I wanted something like that? The problem: Python for scripting Beside programming and data science, I find Python to be a very useful glue language; I think it's great for shell replacement when bash/zsh scripts get too complex, but there's one caveat: as long as you can

Application authors: please don't force users into your language or packaging details

This story has been boiling in my head since long; today I chose to (finally) publish it. Long story short: in order to use a certain application, I should not need to understand how to use the language or its packaging ecosystem. Delivery and distribution is a relevant part of

Misaligned Expectations: investigating the expectations gap

As some of my followers already know, I'm enrolled in the great Master's program at Georgia Tech, the OMSCS. As a part of my studies, I'm doing some research to investigate the expectations gap between the higher education and the industry sectors; why does the university teach students this way?

SCP taming: stop local silliness

Every day now and then, I get an scp command wrong. Scp is designed after commands like rcp and works totally fine for local-to-local file copy. While this can (or could) be useful in some contexts, It's not what I like to do these days; very often, if either hosts

Productivity, the office, and the open floor plan

There's one pattern that, nowadays, I find amusing; the productivity mantra is repeated everywhere. Everybody wants to get more productive, every company is trying to make their employees more productive. Robotics, AI: everything calls for it. From Wikipedia: Productivity describes various measures of the efficiency of production. A productivity measure

Command line data crunching with Python

Every time I'm doing some data crunching on the command line, I find myself juggling between sed, awk, sort, uniq, etc. While I like the UNIX way of having one tool doing one thing well, I sometimes find it slightly boring to put all the tools together, sometimes stretching their

Git: automatically set and use multiple commit identities

Sure, git is great. Sure it is possible to use multiple commit identities in git - just set local per-repo variables. If it weren't for the fact that chances of forgetting about it is about 99.9%. Problem context When installing git, it is required to configure a username and