Once a design of a system meets all the business constraints necessary, my next priority is to make the system as simple as possible. By simple, I mean a system that is both easy to understand and easy to change. … Read the rest
Author: malisper
An Algorithm for Passing Programming Interviews
Over the past few years, I’ve interviewed with a dozen or so companies and have completed ~50 or so individual algorithm problems. I’m frequently given feedback that I did a great job at the algorithms problem. In this post, I’m … Read the rest
Tools in My Toolbox
One of the most important skills I believe programmers need is to understand when to use certain tools. My typical process for solving a problem is to go through each tool in my toolbox and see which one would solve … Read the rest
Advent of Code: Day 3
Day 3’s problem was an interesting one. We are given two wires and have to find the point where the two wires intersect that’s closest to the origin. As usual, we’ll approach this problem in two steps. First we’ll parse … Read the rest
Advent of Code: Day 2
Day 2 of the Advent of Code is a classic – implement a virtual machine for a simple assembly like. Eric Wastl, the creator of the AoC, has been writing challenges like this for years before the AoC even existed! … Read the rest
Advent of Code: Day 1
The Advent of Code is back! In past iterations of the Advent of Code, a bunch of my friends and I would share all our solutions. This year, I thought why not go the extra step and publicly write up … Read the rest
Generating Fractals with Postgres: Self-Similar Fractals
In my last post, I showed you how you could use a number of SQL tricks to generate a class of fractals known as the “escape-time fractals”. In this post I’ll show you how you can use the same … Read the rest
Generating Fractals with Postgres: Escape-Time Fractals
This post is based on half of a talk I gave at !!con. If you want to watch the talk, you can find it here.
One not too well known aspect of SQL is that it’s Turing complete. This … Read the rest
Generating Fractals with SQL Queries
I recently gave a talk at !!Con West about how you can use some of the dark corners of SQL to generate fractals. You can watch the recording here:
To summarize the video, I write SQL queries that generate two … Read the rest
Perfalytics is now Generally Available
After being in beta for several months, Perfalytics is now generally available.
Perfalytics is my attempt to bring a new approach to database performance. Perfalytics integrates directly with your database to collect detailed performance information about your queries. Based on … Read the rest