Gopar - The Golang Parser that Needs a Better Name

A while back I built a PEG (Parsing Expression Grammer) parser in golang. I wasn’t blogging at the time, so the idea slipped under the radar. Here’s a link to the codebase.

A Sketch for a new Distribution Sketch

About three and a half years ago I came up with a clever trick for accurately approximating and tightly bounding a cumulative distribution in a rather small data structure. It’s high time that I blogged about it! In this post I’ll talk about the problem space, my technique, the potential benefits of my approach over other approaches, and ways to improve in the future.

Build your own Skip List

The skip list is one of my favorite data structures.

• It can be used to implement ordered lists or sets.
• It is easy to understand.
• It doesn’t require any complex re-balancing like some of the other ordered-list structures.
• It’s fast. And all of the operations - insert, search, delete - are O(log n) on average.

The Fundamental Problem of Search

It has gnawed on my subconscious for the past 5 years. Even as I wrote Relevant Search it was there at the back of my mind weighing me down - the fundamental problem of search. But only now has the problem taken shape so that I can even begin to describe it. Succinctly, here it is:

Load Testing Elasticsearch Using Python asyncio and the Slow Log

Over the past couple of days I’ve been reading over Yeray Diaz’s wonderful blog posts on python3 asyncio (AsyncIO for the Working Python Developer and Asyncio Coroutine Patterns: Beyond await) and I decided to see if I could come up with some sort of Elasticsearch load testing framework.