September 10, 2019

Writing a Bytecode Compiler and Virtual Machine in Go

While at the Recurse Center, I’ve finished up Thorsten Ball’s book, Writing a Compiler in Go. Thorsten’s book is an excellent resource for learning about Compilers and Virtual Machines due to the well thought out explanations and diagrams. I presented the final product during RC’s weekly technical talks and talked about how the Compiler pieces fit together and some of the challenges faced when translating an Interpreter into a Compiler. ... Read more

August 30, 2019

Writing an Interpreter in Go

A few weeks ago, I started at the Recurse Center with the goal of scrubbing away the “magic” behind various software concepts. Of these concepts, Interpreters and Compilers were the first on my agenda. At my previous employer, my team was responsible for internal tooling and SRE work; a lot of the core infrastructure pieces we worked with were built in Go (Nomad, Consul, Vault, Prometheus). In order to gain better visibility and understanding of these tools, I began picking up the Go Programming Language. ... Read more

July 10, 2018

Main Memory Database Systems: An Overview

The types of databases a developer might typically work with are DRDB systems, Disk Resident Database Systems. This paper talks about taking that DRDB system and dumping its disk content directly into memory. Main Memory DBs show dramatic performance improvements since they avoid disk reads. This allows for further optimizations throughout the DBMS since the most expensive part of the system was removed. The trade off with these systems is that main memory is volatile. ... Read more

January 23, 2018

Multi-Factor Authentication

This article aims to highlight what authentication is and why you should use Multi-Factor Authentication. We will start by defining authentication, then discuss the single factor version, as well as not only explore the process of, but convince you to use, Multi-Factor authentication (MFA). As we go, I will speak briefly about MFA’s inner workings which I had the opportunity to develop and then present during my company’s hackathon. What is Authentication ... Read more

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