Recent content in About Me on LARGE DATA BANK
A practical guide to progressively automating management busywork so you can focus on what actually matters. 
 The Problem We All Share 
 Engineering management is a role with an enormous surface area. On any given day you’re context-switching between email triage, Slack threads, meeting follow-ups, Jira hygiene, doc reviews, approval queues, and calendar Tetris. None of this is the…
How I abused a display interface designed for LCD screens to get flicker-free LED panels — and how Claude Code helped me design, build, and debug the whole driver. 
 The Flicker Problem 
 My friend David and I have a project called pifi — a Raspberry Pi that drives a 64x32 RGB LED matrix panel. It plays YouTube videos, runs screensavers, and hosts multiplayer Snake. The whole thing is…

 I wrote about my home office setup soon after
COVID rendered many of us work from home hostages. It’s a popular post, and one
that I’ve enjoyed sharing frequently to friends, coworkers, and Twitch denizens
who are interested in enhancing their own home setups or curious about how I
achieve high quality video and audio in remote meetings. 
 Since then, however,…

 If you’re reading this post, you might be interested in trying your hand at
live coding on stream, as a way of sharing your projects in a more relatable,
immediate way than a polished blog post, teaching others about programming, or
just as a way to have fun. I think that live coding and streams in general are
an interesting possible future form of both education and…

 My home office desk setup has changed a lot since I started working from home full-time due to COVID-19. This post explains what goes into the setup that I’ve got, along with ample photographs. 
 The transition to full remote both left me with more time on my hands and inspired me to tidy up and optimize my setup for comfort and improved AV. I’ve also started streaming…
In a tradition that’s as old as time itself, I’m writing this blog post to commemorate moving my blog to a new blogging framework, Hugo. 
 When I started this blog in 2012, the hotness was Octopress. Now the hotness is Hugo. So, I’ve converted my old posts to Hugo and refreshed the theme a little bit. 
 Hopefully this won’t become the last new post, but you never…
In this video, I break down what Column Families are in CockroachDB , why you’d want to use them, and how you can explore them in more detail for yourself.


 
 
 
 
 
 Column families are a concept that allows you to change how rows are stored in a SQL table, to improve performance and reduce contention. By default, all of the columns of a row are stored in a…
Section 2.2’s exercises define some optimizations to the section’s unbalanced
tree set implementation. 
 Exercise 2.2 
 The implementation of member that Okasaki gives for binary search trees in
section 2.2 performs 2d comparisons for a tree of depth d in the worst
case, when searching for a number that is the farthest to the right on the
tree, and when the…
Section 2.2 presents immutable sets implemented with unbalanced binary search
trees, a slightly more complex example of immutable data sharing than the list
example in Section 2.1 . My
first challenge was to reimplement Okasaki’s base implementation of unbalanced
binary search tree sets using idiomatic Scala. I had to learn a fair amount
more about Scala’s type…
At the end of my last post, I mentioned that I ended up reusing Scala’s build-in
List collection to implement the exercises instead of writing a generic abstract
Stack and sample implementations of those. Since then, I’ve spent some time
learning about how to implement generic collections in Scala. I came up with
a Stack trait, a la Okasaki’s Stack signature, and…
This is the inaugural post of the PFDS series. 
 Section 2.1 discusses the ramifications of implementing lists and stacks in a
functional and immutable manner. Using the operation of list catenation 
as a motivator, Okasaki introduces the idea of data sharing. We see that to
catenate two lists, we can share the second list, which doesn’t get modified,
but must copy all of…
I heard a lot of good things about Mike Okasaki’s Purely Functional Data Structures at UChicago, but didn’t ever take the time to check it out. Lately I’ve missed the heady joy of reading and writing code in a strongly typed functional programming language like Standard ML, so when one of my coworkers at Knewton mentioned he was going to read the book I decided to get a copy for…
I’m Jordan Lewis. I’m VP of Engineering at Cockroach
Labs and I’m a townie, still living in my hometown
of Brooklyn, New York. 
 
 Previously I worked at Knewton 
 I graduated from The University of Chicago in 2011 with a B.S. in Computer Science. 
 Download my resume ( LaTeX source ). 
 I write code on GitHub . 
 I used to stream database…
Hi internet! I’ve gotten with the program and bloggified my website with the help of the pretty rad Octopress framework. Hope you enjoy it.