Alone on the Wall by Alex Honnold and David Roberts This is a memoir of sorts by a rock climber most famous for his free solo ascents(free soloing = rock climbing without a rope). The reason I picked up this book is because I’ve been doing some climbing myself…
I have lately been studying how databases work under the hood. There are many problems that a database has to solve. At the moment, I’ve been having fun exploring how data is stored on disk. Previously, I wrote about how a hashtable is stored on disk. This post is…
In the last post, I introduced the idea of linear hashing. This post will describe a Rust implementation of the algorithm. I won’t go through every last line of code, but hopefully enough to give you a good understanding of how the whole thing works. I should also mention…
In this series of posts, I want to walk you through how to build a simple, persistent key-value store. We will be using an on-disk hashtable(also called external hashtable) to store the key-value mappings. In this post, I will explain hashtables briefly and an algorithm called linear hashing. In…
* Computers can be understoodExplains a mindset to understand systems by looking under the layers of abstraction. * Systems that defy detailed understanding: Follow-up to the above, listing some types of systems where it’s either impossible or just not worth it to understand from first-principles how the system works. Advocates using…
Grr. I really need to write blog posts other than book reviews. But until then, here are some notes on two books I read recently: Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner Superforecasting is a book about what qualities it takes for a person to be good at forecasting events.…
Spin is a sci-fi trilogy comprising of the books Spin, Axis and Vortex. The first book in the series, Spin is a really great science-fiction story and the Hugo award it won is well-deserved. Since it is a story that can be easily spoiled, I’ll try to sell it…
Just finished reading “Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman. I think I put the book in my to-read list after Alan Kay recommended in a talk of his(I don’t remember which one). The book is about how any communication medium dictates the kind of discourse taking place…