Reid Draper's blog
Writing simple-check Nov 3, 2013 For the past several months I’ve been working on a QuickCheck (QC) library for Clojure: simple-check . In this post, we’ll look at three issues I ran into porting QC from Haskell to Clojure: typing, shrinking, and laziness. This will not act as an introduction to QC, or property-based testing. Further, this post assumes some familiarity with Haskell and Clojure.…
Data Traceability May 16, 2013 This text appears as Chapter 17 in O’Reilly’s Bad Data Handbook (ISBN-13: 978-1449321888). It is released under the CC BY-SA license. Your software consistently provides impressive music recommendations by combining cultural and audio data. Customers are happy. However, things aren’t always perfect. Sometimes that Beyoncé track is attributed to Beyonce. The artist…
Introducing Knockbox Dec 10, 2011 For the past few weeks I’ve been working on a Clojure library called knockbox . It’s a library meant to make dealing with conflict-resolution in eventually-consistent databases easier. If you’re not familiar with eventual-consistency, I’d suggest this article by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. Distributed databases like Riak let you trade consistency for availability.…
Writing Your First Chef Recipe Apr 18, 2011 Chef is an infrastructure automation tool that lets you write Ruby code to describe how your machines should be set up. Applications for Chef vary from configuring complicated multi-node applications, to setting up your personal workstation . As great as Chef is, getting started can be a bit daunting. It’s worse if you’re not sure exactly what Chef…
100-Node Riak Cluster for $2 Apr 3, 2011 Riak is a distributed key-value store; data is replicated and partitioned across your cluster. Increasing the cluster size allows you to scale both performance and fault-tolerance. One of the most powerful parts of Riak is the ability to add a new node to your cluster with one command: riak-admin join riak@example.com With the recent trend toward…