On porting code
Of late, my main side project has been rug, a stripped-down Git implementation which I'm building in Rust. I'm following along James Coglan's excellent book Building Git where he lays out how he went about building the same project, in Ruby.
Piping output to a pager
When you run git diff on a project where you've made more than a screenful of changes, the output is automatically redirected to a pager and you can browse through your changes using the familiar less interface. This post shows a minimal example piping output to less.
Myers' Diff Algorithm in Clojure
If you're a programmer, you're probably fairly comfortable with understanding and interpreting diff patches of the kind that git and other version control systems use. In this post we'll walk through a Clojure implementation of the Myers' diff algorithm, which is the algorithm used by Git.
Summary of Recent Reading(July-September 2019)
The Little Elixir & OTP Guidebook by Benjamin Tan Wei Hao: an introduction to the Elixir programming language and the OTP framework that comes with it. It focusses on Elixir's concurrency features and shows you what OTP can do(the book mostly focusses on GenServers and Supervisors) without spending too much time on the langua...
Summary of recent reading(April-June 2019)
Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool: a book on deliberate practice by one of the researchers who originally coined the term. This book lays out a framework for how to achieve expertise. Briefly, this goes as follows: identify what skills and mental representations an expert possesses, design a step-by-step program where y...
Summary of recent reading(January-March 2019)
Messy by Tim Harford: how pursuing tidy systems is harming us and why we should embrace messy systems that better reflect the unpredictableness of the real world. The systems in question can be anything from how you organize your inbox to how cities are laid out. Although it struck me while reading this book how similar most ...
Book reviews- Alone on the wall, The Push, Can't Hurt Me
Alone on the Wall by Alex Honnold and David Roberts
Disk-based algorithms
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 somewhat similar– I talk about how data stored on disk can be sorted.
Implementing a Key-value Store, Part 2
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 that even though this is a post about implementing linear hashin...