Notes & essays
Writing
Thoughts on technology, data, and building things.
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How YouTubers Balance Ad Revenue and Viewer Retention
Creators face a delicate tradeoff: ads must be relevant enough to avoid alienating viewers, but not so relevant they’d feature them for free. Using LinusTechTips’ economics as a case study, we’ll explore the “sweet spot” that...
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Set up and use SQL in the cloud
Most people have limits on the computational capacity they have access to. Here I’ll describe steps to set up a SQL database on the cloud where, instead of paying for a brand new computer, one can...
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Are Ad Exchanges similar to Stock Exchanges?
Ad exchanges sit between people who want to buy ads (advertisers) and those who wish to sell their ad spots (publishers). They help publishers maximize the value of each ad spot by collecting bids and ads...
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RAID is a compromise
If you ever needed to use a bunch of disks as a single disk, then you might have heard of RAID. This wikipedia article is a good reference for a few commonly used RAID types.
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Docker for linux casuals
Many moons ago I recall installing Ubuntu on my home PC because I was sick of Windows, the only operating system I had used up to that point. Even though Ubuntu was (and still is) a...
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Un-Spaghettio My Factorio!
So some time ago I picked up Factorio on steam some time ago. The goal of the game is to gather resources and build tools, transportation, production and automation to bootstrap your way eventually to construct...
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Why Can’t I Just Cron My Batch Pipeline?
So many batch pipeline orchestrators, which one to use? (hint: not cron)
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New Final Final (2) Copy: Ideas in Version Control
There comes a time in every project when one has to come to terms with the mess that they have made. The number of files is increasing, and each file claims to be the most recent...
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Computations on Distributed Datasets
Overview on the “why’s” and “how’s” of computations on distributed datasets — and what’s this Map-Reduce thing anyway?