data, code and conversation

Depending on your perspective, Reddit is either one of the last great online communities or a petri dish for the internet’s most cutting-edge bots.

One of my favorite conference talks of all time is Statistics Without the Agonizing Pain, by John Rauser, who was at that time head of data science at Pinterest.

I just tried to use one of the Amazon Nova models in AWS, and I got the following error message: After some tooling around, I noticed that the error message was listing us-west-2 in the error message, even though I was working in us-east-2.

I’m using Google BigQuery to do some ETL, and have found OpenAI’s products to be enormously helpful for the task.

Rapier is a code generation companion library for Google Dagger.

While there are many examples of Jackson serialization to JSON, there are comparatively few resources of Jackson serialization to CSV.

Need a regular expression to recognize the 249 officially-assigned codes from the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 and alpha-3 standards?

As convenient and powerful as AWS API Gateway is, it’s not without its quirks.

There’s a lot of discussion about how to use ChatGPT to generate tests for code.

As part of updates to arachn.io, I’ve started tinkering with object detection machine learning models.

Java has a rich set of tools for processing images built in to the standard library.

Because Java 21 virtual threads are very cheap — per JEP Cafe, they are about 1,000 times faster to launch than a platform thread, and use about 1,000 times less memory than a platform thread — they should never be pooled.

When writing code or testing, it’s useful to have valid examples of whatever you’re working with for sanity checks.

I’m porting Jonas Wagner‘s excellent smartcrop.js, which analyzes an image to recommend a good crop, from JavaScript to Java.

Based on the results of this JMH benchmark, string operations are faster than regex operations in Java, even if the two operations are logically the same, like String.equals and Pattern.matcher/Matcher.matches.

The source code never lies.

WebFlow is an outstanding website design, development, and hosting platform.

I couldn’t find an example payload for CloudWatch Logs data delivered by a Kinesis Firehose stream to a Lambda function URL, so I set one up.

Modern serverless applications on AWS are complex with a lot of moving parts.

AWS Lambda is Amazon’s FaaS product.

As part of optimizing the HumanGraphics product, I am investigating different cloud architectures and their tradeoffs.

I’ve added a new custom base image for Java 21 on Lambda to complement the community base images already available for Java 17, Java 18, Java 19, and Java 20.

By standing on the shoulders of giants (I’m looking at you, Mark Sailes), I was able to turn around an AWS Lambda Custom Runtime for Java 21 on Java 21 launch day.

HumanGraphics is a REST API that converts names, locations, and faces into structured data and demographics estimates.

The excellent PostgreSQL database supports the following syntax for the common upsert SQL pattern: With this syntax, you can insert a new row with the given values, or update the existing row to the given values, using the row’s primary key (or other inde…

The writing system that people use can actually tell you a lot about the person: where they are, what language(s) they speak, and so on.

I needed a dataset of popular names by country for testing, but I couldn’t find one that had everything I needed.

Need a regular expression to recognize the 50 US state names or USPS abbrevations?

A new version v15.0.1 of my emoji processing library, emoji4j, for Java 8+ just dropped.

If you ever need to convert “plain” social media text like: Hey @importantguy, check out my project https://www.mycoolproject.com/ #PrettyPlease into “rich” social media text like: Hey @importantguy, check out my project https://www.mycoolproject.com/ #Pr…

I’m a software architect, software engineer, data scientist, and analyst by trade.

I’m using AWS Step Functions to do some complex orchestration of services that could span more than 25,000 state transitions and exchange data sets larger than 256KB, so I’m making heavy use of the new distributed map feature.

The excellent vector database Pinecone has a very useful API, but client support is sparse.

I’ve added a new custom base image for Java 20 on Lambda to complement the community base images already available for Java 17, Java 18, and Java 19.

I'm in the process of developing the marketing website for Arachnio.

In my opinion, JDBI is simply the best database access framework for relational databases available for Java today.

If anyone needs a regular expression for matching single Emoji in BigQuery/RE2, this is a good place to start: (?

I’ve added a new custom base image for Java 19 on Lambda to complement the community base images already available for Java 17 and Java 18.

I’ve added a new custom base image for Java 18 on Lambda to complement the community Java 17 base images already available.

I’ve just released my first commercial API, arachn.io.

Thinking about using an AWS Lambda function using the excellent awslabs/aws-serverless-java-container as an AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) target?

I’m (finally) upgrading several projects to Java 17, the current LTS version.

I just released the first beta version of litecene, a Java library that implements a common boolean search syntax for full-text search, with its first transpiler for BigQuery.

This is the third post in a three-post series covering the fundamentals of software performance analysis.

This is the second post in a three-post series covering the fundamentals of software optimization.

This is the first post in a three-post series covering the fundamentals of software optimization.

This is the introduction to a three-post series covering the fundamentals of software optimization.

The OpenAPI Generator is a wonderful bit of tech.

As part of a side project, I ended up producing a large dendrogram.

I was investigating the feasibility of putting natively-formatted Twitter data into BigQuery, and got pretty far along the way before deciding to go another direction.