Observations

This is just a quick note on the performance of writing to a file on disk using Go, and reveals a question about a common programming paradigm that I am now suspicious of. I discovered that when I wrapped the open file object with a bufio.Writer that the performance of my writes to disk significantly increased. Ok, so this isn’t about simple file writing to disk, this is about a complex writer that does some seeking in the file writing to different positions and maintains the overall state of what’s on disk in memory, however the question remains: ...

I’m preparing to move into a new job when I finish my dissertation hopefully later this summer. The new role involves web application development with Rails and so I needed to get up to speed. I had a web application requirement for my research so I figured I’d knock out two birds with one stone and build that app with Rails (a screenshot of the app is above, though of course this is just a front-end and doesn’t really tell you it was built with Rails). ...

One of the projects I’m currently working on is the ingestion of RSS feeds into a Mongo database. It’s been running for the past year, and as of this post has collected 1,575,987 posts for 373 feeds after 8,126 jobs. This equates to about 585GB of raw data, and a firm requirement for compression in order to exchange data. Recently, @ojedatony1616 downloaded the compressed zip file (53GB) onto a 1TB external hard disk and attempted to decompress it. After three days, he tried to cancel it and ended up restarting his computer because it wouldn’t cancel. His approach was simply to double click the file on OS X, but that got me to thinking – it shouldn’t have taken that long; why did it choke? Inspecting the export logs on the server, I noted that it took 137 minutes to compress the directory; shouldn’t it take that long to decompress as well? ...

An interesting question came up in the development of Yellowbrick: given a vector of values, what is the quickest way to get the unique values? Ok, so maybe this isn’t a terribly interesting question, however the results surprised us and may surprise you as well. First we’ll do a little background, then I’ll give the results and then discuss the benchmarking method. The problem comes up in Yellowbrick when we want to get the discrete values for a target vector, y — a problem that comes up in classification tasks. By getting the unique set of values we know the number of classes, as well as the class names. This information is necessary during visualization because it is vital in assigning colors to individual classes. Therefore in a Visualizer we might have a method as follows: ...

Part of my research is taking me down a path where I want to measure the number of reads and writes from a client to a storage server. A key metric that we’re looking for is throughput — the number of accesses per second that a system supports. As I discovered in a very simple test to get some baseline metrics, even this simple metric can have some interesting complications. ...

On Tuesday evening I attended a Django District meetup on Grumpy, a transpiler from Python to Go. Because it was a Python meetup, the talk naturally focused on introducing Go to a Python audience, and because it was a Django meetup, we also focused on web services. The premise for Grumpy, as discussed in the announcing Google blog post, is also a web focused one — to take YouTube’s API that’s primarily written in Python and transpile it to Go to improve the overall performance and stability of YouTube’s front-end services. ...

In this post I wanted to catalog the process of an open source contribution I was a part of, which added a feature to the memory profiler Python library by Fabian Pedregosa and Philippe Gervais. It’s a quick story to tell but took over a year to complete, and I learned a lot from the process. I hope that the story is revealing, particularly to first time contributors and shows that even folks that have been doing this for a long time still have to find ways to positively approach collaboration in an open source environment. I also think it’s a fairly standard example of how contributions work in practice and perhaps this story will help us all think about how to better approach the pull request process. ...