Archive of stories published by Build and Learn

Choosing Data Structures: A guide for the confused

This past friday I was teaching a workshop at Coalition for Queens to prepare alumni from their code school for interviews as software developers. One asked about resources for learning how to choose data structures in practice, because she…


Streaming is a myth — Reactive vs Rigid is the real distinction

Tl;dr — Streaming architectures are a special case of reactive architectures (and not actually a myth). The distinction between reactive and rigid distributed architectures is much more important than streaming vs batch…


Perfect table migrations in redshift and hive

Always do your migrations like this

Here’s a neat little trick due to David Heller at Alooma — perform any migration in redshift (or other columnar store) without any need for downtime, table locking…


Fun with text generation pt. 1: markov models in awk

Inspired by Really fast Markov chains in ~20 lines of sh, grep, cut and awk this series is intended to explore text generation, first with markov models, then with generative adversarial networks.

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