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Flying With the Wind
On a romantic date 12,000 kilometers from home, I sat in a hot air balloon wondering how the pilot managed to steer the aircraft. After all, it seemed like the balloon only had controls to go up and down, yet the flight path seemed so intentional. I wanted to understand the dynamics of these balloons, and build a virtual controller capable of maneuvering them.
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The Elevator Is Slow
I live in a 20-story building with two elevators, and sometimes it seems like they take forever to show up. After missing the bus multiple times due to unexpectedly long waits for the elevator, I decided to write a simulation to better understand the source of my misery.
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Graph-Oriented Programming
I have recently been developing in a graph-based domain-specific language at work that powers most of the user onboarding flows. It was created in-house and has evolved over the years. I wanted to share some interesting learnings about the language itself as well as improvements that we made to enhance developer efficiency and language safety.
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Dual-Client Migration Patterns
It is often said that all problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection. In the case of migrations, I have found this to be a surprisingly accurate aphorism. By introducing an additional layer in client logic that conditionally routes traffic to two different targets, we can perform migrations for a variety of different scenarios in a safe and transparent manner.
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Memory Fragmentation in Go
Inspired by a seemingly unexplainable out of memory error in a service, I set out to understand how Go’s non-moving memory management works under the hood. This led to some interesting learnings about memory fragmentation, the types of workloads that are prone to this issue, and potential mitigations.
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Compressing Sentry Ownership Rules
I had to solve a fun problem at work related to Sentry’s ownership rules because my changes put us over the character limit. It felt very much like an interview problem. However, I think the ideal implementation is not one which has the optimal time complexity or compression ratio.
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Interesting Magic Squares
Earlier this year, I visited Barcelona for the first time and saw the magic square on the Sagrada Familia. Unlike a normal 4×4 magic square, this one has a magic constant of 33 and a total of 310 combinations that add up to the magic constant. I wanted to know if there were other magic squares that had even more interesting properties given similar constraints.
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Adventures With Aurora (Part 3)
We had successfully mitigated our database’s I/O bottleneck by batching high throughput transactions in the application layer. However, Aurora had one last trick up its sleeve. Meanwhile, an upcoming project gave us the opportunity to implement a long-term fix for our database load issues.
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Adventures With Aurora (Part 2)
When we left off, we had two failed attempts at resolving Aurora MySQL I/O issues by tuning database parameters. We also managed to stumble on a 10-year-old deadlock bug in MySQL 5.6. Rather than continuing to explore risky database-level changes, we turned our attention to the application.
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Adventures With Aurora (Part 1)
I have been battling with an Aurora MySQL database at work for the past few months. As a result, I learned a lot about the internals of MySQL and how to debug database-related issues. In this three-part series, I wanted to share some of the challenges that we encountered and how we solved them.
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