I’ve never loved the feel of mechanical keyboards, but my wrists decided it was time for me to give up my beloved Apple Magic Keyboard. Years ago, Frank at Materialize almost talked me into a Ferris Sweep with nice!nanos, but I went down a rabbit-hole of which choc color would feel most like a scissor-switch and never emerged. Then recently, I saw the ZSA Voyager , which was almost perfect 1 , and…
Cross-posted on the Materialize Blog . At Materialize , Rust compile times are a frequent complaint. On one hand, I’m forever anchored by the Scala compile times from my days at Foursquare; a clean build without cache hits took over an hour. On the other, Go at Cockroach Labs was great. Rust is in between, but much closer to Go than to Scala. So far, I’ve mostly insulated myself from this here by…
Previous posts talked about what I’m hoping to do and some background on the Freebase data. Today, we (finally) take Materialize out for a spin. Part 1: Introduction Part 2: The Data Part 3: First Impressions (you’re here) First, a quick note: one of my motivations for doing this is to get a feel for Materialize as a user, so I’m going to take my developer hat off and put my user hat on. I’ve only…
Last post , I introduced the idea of using Materialize to implement fast reads of highly normalized Freebase data for an API endpoint. Today, we start by downloading the data and doing a bit of preprocessing. Part 1: Introduction Part 2: The Data (you’re here) Part 3: First Impressions 1.9 Billion Triples # The final public copy of the Freebase data can be downloaded at…
I recently started working at Materialize . Friday here is called “Skunkworks Friday” and is reserved for personal/professional development, moonshot projects, and other things that don’t get priority as part of the normal product+engineering planning cycle. I’ve decided to use my first few to prototype using Materialize as a generalized replacement for some hand-rolled infrastructure…
“What note-taking app do you use? Do you like it? I currently use Evernote and kind of hate it.” — co-worker on our internal slack “Twitter productivity gurus and tinkerers. What is the best cross-platform, light-weight note-taking app these days?” — Noah Weiss Allow me to introduce you to my favorite piece of software, Simplenote. As the name suggests, it’s for notes and it’s intentionally…
My take on making Jim Lahey’s No-Knead Bread even simpler I love making bread. It does, however, lead to more bread than I can eat, which leads to me giving away loaves of bread at every opportunity. Occasionally this leads to someone asking me how I make bread. These days I follow the recipes in Ken Forkish’s book Flour Water Salt Yeast as closely as possible. It’s an excellent book and I’ve had…
Originally published at www.cockroachlabs.com on August 9, 2017. Almost all widely used database systems include the ability to backup and restore a snapshot of their data. The replicated nature of CockroachDB’s distributed architecture means that the cluster survives the loss of disks or nodes, and yet many users still want to make regular backups. This led us to develop distributed backup and…
Originally published at www.cockroachlabs.com on September 29, 2016. CockroachDB is a scalable SQL database built on top of a transactional key value store. We don’t (yet) expose the kv layer but it’s general purpose enough that we’ve used it to implement SQL without any special trickery. The particulars of how we represent data in a SQL table as well as the table metadata are internally called…