Blake Matheny

“Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.” - Albert Einstein - Blake Matheny

Why an article on managing people? And one written by someone with training in computer science rather than business administration? There are thousands of books on the best ways to manage people. Many of these books are excellent, having been written by people who've devoted their lives to the discipline. Software engineering is different. Software engineering is different because only the best people significantly contribute to achievement. - Blake Matheny

Why an article on managing people? And one written by someone with training in computer science rather than business administration? There are thousands of books on the best ways to manage people. Many of these books are excellent, having been written by people who've devoted their lives to the discipline. Software engineering is different. Software engineering is different because only the best people significantly contribute to achievement. - Blake Matheny

Resque is our Redis-backed library for creating background jobs, placing those jobs on multiple queues, and processing them later. Background jobs can be any Ruby class or module that responds to perform. Your existing classes can easily be converted to background jobs or you can create new classes specifically to do work. Or, you can do both. All the details are in the README. We've used it to process over 10m jobs since our move to Rackspace and are extremely happy with it. - Blake Matheny

Recently, there has been a lot of chitchat about the eventual consistency model as illustrated in the famous Amazon Dynamo paper, and today employed by several non-relational databases such as Voldemort or Cassandra. Everything starts with this blog post by the Facebook Infrastructure Lead, claiming: "Dynamo: A flawed architecture", where he makes a few points against the eventual consistency model and the related "sloppy" quorum approach. However, his points seems to be based on a few misconceptions which the Amazon paper doesn't help to clarify, so let's try to spread some light by first giving a few definitions, and then a simple example. - Blake Matheny

Mongo (from "humongous") is a high-performance, open source, schema-free, document-oriented database. It is also used by some serious companies. Features include: * Collection oriented storage: easy storage of object/JSON -style data * Dynamic queries * Full index support, including on inner objects and embedded arrays * Query profiling * Replication and fail-over support * Efficient storage of binary data including large objects (e.g. photos and videos) * Auto-sharding for cloud-level scalability (currently in early alpha) - Blake Matheny

People want a comparison of the concrete differences between fat pinging (PubSubHubbub, XMPP pubsub) and light pinging (rssCloud, XML-RPC pings, changes.xml, SUP, SLAP). This document aims to construct and convey an evaluation of these protocols that's easy to understand. - Blake Matheny

A bit of info on Cucumber and the testing DSL. - Blake Matheny

Distributed, scalable databases are desperately needed these days. From building massive data warehouses at a social media startup, to protein folding analysis at a biotech company, “Big Data” is becoming more important every day. While Hadoop has emerged as the de facto standard for handling big data problems, there are still quite a few distributed databases out there and each has their unique strengths. - Blake Matheny

Description of the general algorithm used by after the deadline for handling spelling correction. - Blake Matheny

Mobile has been a hard problem space for testing: a humongous browser, phone, capability combination which is changing fast as the underlying technology evolves. Add to this poor tool support for the mobile platform and the rapid evolution of the device and you'll understand why I am so interested in advice on how to do better test design. We've literally tried everything, from checking screenshots of Google's properties on mobile phones to treating the phone like a collection of client apps and automating them in the UI button-clicking traditional way. - Blake Matheny

Someone at work recently asked how he should go about studying machine learning on his own. So I’m putting together a little guide. This post will be a living document…I’ll keep adding to it, so please suggest additions and make comments. - Blake Matheny

Online PDF book on Scheme. Haven't read this one though. - Blake Matheny

A place to ask questions about Mathematics. - Blake Matheny

Most Haskell tutorials on the web seem to take a language-reference-manual approach to teaching. They show you the syntax of the language, a few language constructs, and then have you construct a few simple functions at the interactive prompt. The "hard stuff" of how to write a functioning, useful program is left to the end, or sometimes omitted entirely. This tutorial takes a different tack. You'll start off with command-line arguments and parsing, and progress to writing a fully-functional Scheme interpreter that implements a good-sized subset of R5RS Scheme. Along the way, you'll learn Haskell's I/O, mutable state, dynamic typing, error handling, and parsing features. By the time you finish, you should be fairly fluent in both Haskell and Scheme. - Blake Matheny

In my investigations into string metrics, similarity metrics and the like I have developed an open source library of Similarity metrics called SimMetrics. SimMetrics is an open source java library of Similarity or Distance Metrics, e.g. Levenshtein distance , that provide float based similarity measures between String Data. All metrics return consistant measures rather than unbounded similarity scores. - Blake Matheny

A bunch of math blogs. - Blake Matheny

In games or educational programs you often don't want real randomness. Unsurprisingly random it's often a bit too random. You may get some items several times in a row and others too rarely. It's either too easy or too hard. Balancing the weights is hard as well, because each run is too different. And if that wouldn't be already bad enough; it's also difficult to verify the results. Note: The continuous shuffled sequence algorithm which I'll explain in the second half of the article can be easily ported to other languages. All you need are arrays (and a copy function or resizable arrays) and a random number generator. Before I'll dive into shuffled sequences I'll outline the other issues of the obvious approaches. Because that's apparently more fun to do. - Blake Matheny

In games or educational programs you often don't want real randomness. Unsurprisingly random it's often a bit too random. You may get some items several times in a row and others too rarely. It's either too easy or too hard. Balancing the weights is hard as well, because each run is too different. And if that wouldn't be already bad enough; it's also difficult to verify the results.... more... - Blake Matheny

Most websites don’t need to do complicated things like store polygon data. They just need to store points on a map and then retrieve those points. They also need to be able to ask the database for all points within a rectangle. So I’m going to run you through schema creation, inserting data, getting your lat/lon data out of the database again, and querying the database for all points within a rectangle. We’re also going to deal with the nasty little issue of asking the database for points in a rectangle that crosses the 180 degree boundary (or the International Date Line). - Blake Matheny

But deadlines are deadlines. If you have a project due Tuesday — then there’s no choice but to complete it by Tuesday. Sure, you can try to push the deadline but there’s still one! To help with the situation and motivate me to clear the work that are currently pending, I’ve come up with 6 great (and free!) tools, categorized into 3 groups. - Blake Matheny

But deadlines are deadlines. If you have a project due Tuesday — then there’s no choice but to complete it by Tuesday. Sure, you can try to push the deadline but there’s still one! To help with the situation and motivate me to clear the work that are currently pending, I’ve come up with 6 great (and free!) tools, categorized into 3 groups. - Blake Matheny

What is interesting is not simply knowing the numbers. What is interesting is the shorthand debugging that it offers you. For example, if support calls up and says that a customer is complaining that the management functions are "very slow to load", and it turns out to be about 6 minutes, then the first place I'll look is to see if it's trying to talk to a remote system, and if there's some sort of problem in that communication. - Blake Matheny

[patterns] [designpatterns] - Blake Matheny

Up until maybe a year ago, I had a pretty one-dimensional view of so-called "Agile" programming, namely that it's an idiotic fad-diet of a marketing scam making the rounds as yet another technological virus implanting itself in naive programmers who've never read "No Silver Bullet", the kinds of programmers who buy extended warranties and self-help books and believe their bosses genuinely care about them as people, the kinds of programmers who attend conferences to make friends and who don't know how to avoid eye contact with leaflet-waving fanatics in airports and who believe writing shit on index cards will suddenly make software development easier. - Blake Matheny

Get your free FBI file today! Freedom of Information Act. - Blake Matheny

In the past week, two friends (Dean and Bill) independently told me they were amazed at how Google does spelling correction so well and quickly. Type in a search like [speling] and Google comes back in 0.1 seconds or so with Did you mean: spelling. (Yahoo and Microsoft are similar.) What surprised me is that I thought Dean and Bill, being highly accomplished engineers and mathematicians, would have good intuitions about statistical language processing problems such as spelling correction. But they didn't, and come to think of it, there's no reason they should: it was my expectations that were faulty, not their knowledge. I figured they and many others could benefit from an explanation. The full details of an industrial-strength spell corrector like Google's would be more confusing than enlightening, but I figured that on the plane flight home, in less than a page of code. - Blake Matheny

Part of what makes Google such an amazing engine of innovation is their internal technology stack: a set of powerful proprietary technologies that makes it easy for Google developers to generate and process enormous quantities of data. According to a senior Microsoft developer who moved to Google, Googlers work and think at a higher level of abstraction than do developers at many other companies, including Microsoft: “Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the if statement” (Credit: Joel Spolsky). This series of posts describes some of the technologies that make this high level of abstraction possible. - Blake Matheny