Posts

Uber's Michelangelo vs. Netflix's Metaflow

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  Uber's Michelangelo vs. Netflix's Metaflow Michelangelo Pain point Without michelangelo, each team at uber that uses ML (that’s all of them - every interaction with the ride or eats app involves ML) would need to build their own data pipelines, feature stores, training clusters, model storage, etc.  It would take each team copious amounts of time to maintain and improve their systems, and common patterns/best practices would be hard to learn.  In addition, the highest priority use cases (business critical, e.g. rider/driver matching) would themselves need to ensure they have enough compute/storage/engineering resources to operate (outages, scale peaks, etc.), which would results in organizational complexity and constant prioritization battles between managers/directors/etc. Solution Michelangelo provides a single platform that makes the most common and most business critical ML use cases simple and intuitive for builders to use, while still allowing self-serve extensibi...
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Develop With Passion Week Long Course

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This past week I attended a course in Austin, TX by a company called Develop With Passion, where I got some much-needed education on design patterns, good OO design and how to apply it to a code base.  This post will be about the course and my thoughts on my journey in software so far. "The greatest of weaknesses is the fear of appearing weak to others."  - First off, I should share where I'm at.  I've just graduated with a BSc. in Computer Science from the University of Calgary.  I landed a sweet job at Amazon in Seattle, and I'm starting there later this year.  I did an internship in oil & gas in Calgary, AB that finished in Dec. 2011, and that combined with my class assignments and small personal projects makes up the entirety of my programming experience...I thought I was ok at coding, I figured I could probably hold my own in design discussions with most professionals, especially after my experience in my internship.  After all, having a d...
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Ruby on Rails Testing tools

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These are a summary of the tools I've been able to get working on my Ubuntu 11.10 machine for use while testing & developing with Ruby on Rails, while going through the book Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial, M. Hartl rspec rspec-rails autotest spork for up-to-date installing instructions, go to http://ruby.railstutorial.org/chapters/static-pages#sec:testing_tools
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Rails on heroku

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Just found out that the new Rails 3.1.3 can be deployed to heroku using 'heroku create --stack cedar' instead of 'heroku create'.  By doing this, the only thing you have to change in the Gemfile is delete the line 'gem sqlite3' and add the following: group :development, :test do   gem 'sqlite3' end group :production do   gem 'pg' end then commit and push to heroku.
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Deploying a Rails 3.1.1 app to heroku using Ruby 1.9.3 and Ubuntu 11.10

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Hello friends. :P I (FINALLY) got a Rails app working on heroku!  But it took some doing - even the basic template rails app wouldn't work on heroku!  And the getting started walkthrough on the heroku website didn't tell me what to do about the errors.  I'm still not sure if it's my OS that makes this trickier than advertised, or if it's the version of Ruby or Rails that I'm using...or maybe it's heroku's problem?  Oh well.  But here's my setup, and if you've got the same then this tutorial should work for you.  This tutorial assumes you've already setup your heroku account. Operating System: Ubuntu 11.10 Ruby version : 1.9.3p0 Rails version : 3.1.1 Source control : Git  First off, if you haven't already, generate a stock app, and enter its directory : >rails new my_app >cd my_app Next, initialize a new Git repository, and add everything to it : >git init >git add . >git commit -am "Initial co...
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Adapter Design Pattern

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The adapter pattern is an extremely useful pattern for a few reasons. The reason I like it so much is because if you understand it, then you understand the concept of Dependency Inversion (the "D" in SOLID object-oriented design). Dependency Inversion is an object-oriented principle which states that in code, higher level modules should not depend on lower level modules. Instead, lower level modules should depend on higher level ones. Let's say you've got one higher level object that requires a lower level object to do it's job. But the lower-level object is likely to change or be swapped out for another. Here's the bad way to do it: namespace HigherLevelModule { public class HigherLevelObject { ...... public void Run() { LowerLevelObject obj = new LowerLevelObject(); string result = obj.GetSomething(); Console.WriteLine(result); } } } namespace LowerLevelMod...
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Command Design Pattern

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The command pattern is best used when you have a command that must be executed by one object, while another object has the responsibility of deciding WHEN that command will be executed. The three entities associated with the command pattern are: client : the object that CREATES the command object and assigns it's receiver receiver : the object that HAS the method that will be run invoker : the object that DECIDES WHEN the command will be run Now let's look at an example. You have an IDE, and the 'undo' command is extremely important. Every action that is performed on the IDE has a method called undo() on it. But the actions have to be stored somewhere after they perform their task though, so that it's possible to call the undo() methods later, right? The solution is to push each action onto a stack when it's run, and register a listener for the 'undo' keyboard-combination/menu-item. The listener will pop() the stack, and invoke the popped ac...
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Flyweight Design Pattern

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So you have a group of objects that can be reused, but each time you use one you have to create it first. The problem is that instantiating these types of objects is expensive, and you don't want to instantiate the same kind every time you need it. Enter Flyweight design pattern. With this pattern, the trick is to create a new object only when you've never created that same type of object before - if you HAVE created it before, then simply look it up and use the one that's already instantiated. Here's some code: public class Flyweight { public static Dictionary _Table = new Dictionary (); public ISomething GetSomething(int key) { ISomething something; if(_Table.TryGetValue(key, ref something)) { return something; } else { something = new Something(key); _Table.Add(key, something); return something; } } } What this code does is ensure that t...
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