Wikiphilia 2013-06-02 I've been obsessed with Wikipedia for the past ten years. Occasionally I find some good articles worth sharing and that's why I created the wikiphilia Twitter handle. Just a long stream of stuff that for one reason or another may be interesting. Read more…
Spotify's Discovery page 2013-05-31 The Discovery page, the new start page in Spotify, is finally out to a fairly significant percentage of all users. Really happy since we have worked on it for the past six months. Here's a screen shot: Read more…
Fermat's principle 2013-05-21 I was browsing around on the Internet and the physics geek in me started reading about Fermat's principle. And suddenly something came back to me that I've been trying to suppress for many years – how I never understood why there's anything fundamental about the principal of least time. Read more…
Snakebite 2013-05-07 Just promoting Spotify stuff here: check out the Snakebite repo on Github, written by Wouter de Bie. It's a super fast tool to access HDFS over CLI/Python, by accessing the namenode directly over sockets/protobuf. Spotify's developer blog features a nice blog post outlining what it's useful for. Read more…
Stuff that bothers me: “100x faster than Hadoop” 2013-04-27 The simple way to get featured on big data blog these days seem to be Build something that does 1 thing super well but nothing else Benchmark it against Hadoop Publish stats showing that it's 100x faster than Hadoop $$$ Spark claims their 100x faster than Hadoop and there's a lot of stats showing Redshift is 10x faster than Hadoop. Read more…
Being data driven 2013-04-13 I picked up an issue of Foreign Affairs while flying back to NYC from SFO. It features this long interview with U.S. General Stanley McChrystal and I thought it was pretty interesting how striking some of the similarities are between fighting in a war and developing software. Read more…