Latest Blog Posts

• Optimizing Your Learning and Thinking

  I think that it pays to have an optimized workflow of the actual learning process. After all, if you learning efficiency is only at 60%, then that means that out of 10 hours that you put into learning a particular piece of knowledge, you would only retain 60% of the information spread out across those 10 hours, leaving gaps within your knowledge after that 10 hours (meaning that you would have to go back and revise parts that you are not sure of again…).

  May 3, 2021 Read more...

• Using A Hunky Poolboy To Manage Your Python ErlPort Processes in Elixir

  So, you've got lots of Python code being executed, and lots of ad-hoc calling of your Python code. On one hand, you want to dynamically scale to manage demand, but at the same time, you don't want to accidentally crash your application by starting too many Python processes. So… what what's a frazzled developer gotta do to save himself some headache? The key problem that we are trying to solve here pooling, which is the the management of limited resources kept at the ready for any ad-hoc requests for usage.

  Apr 25, 2021 Read more...

• Why Erlang/Elixir? A Fanboy's Argument for Scalable, Distributed, Concurrent Programming While Staying Sane

  I think that it isn't a well kept secret that I'm a fanboy of Elixir. Almost half of my blog posts (at point of writing) are related to Elixir and its ecosystem. But, how exactly did I get to this point? And why? In this post, let's deep dive into what makes Erlang/Elixir so special and why the latest innovations out of this ecosystem keeps me coming back for more.

  Apr 23, 2021 Read more...

• Using Embedded Schemas for Easy Peasy Ecto Preloading

  Structs in Elixir are great, they let you define some data structure and lets you do all sorts of nifty stuff like default values. But what if you want to use this particular struct inside of an Ecto query and then preload associations based on a given field? An Example Problem We have a struct called Deal, which is build dynamically from an SQL query. This means that there is no table associated with our Deal structs.

  Dec 28, 2020 Read more...

• Using Common Table Expressions for Temporary Tables in Elixir (Ecto)

  Ocassionally, when you've got lots of business logic defined, you may need to perform some heavy calculations outside of your main SQL query and then join back the calculated result set into your final query to perform some statistical final calculation. Usually, the calculated result set would be in the form of a list of maps or list of tuples. Thankfully, we can use Ecto.Query.with_cte/3 to help with this. With the help of the PostgreSQL function unnest, we can interpolate arrays into the query while also defining the data type for that temporary column.

  Dec 6, 2020 Read more...

• Deploying a Trained SpaCy Model As a Python Sub-Package

  So you've trained your spaCy NLP model, you've got it to the highest accuracy you can push it to, and now you want to use it in your project or product. Now, what do you do? If we were to take a glance at the official spaCy documentation for packaging, they advise using their command line interface to build a deployable Python package containing the model. This results in a package that can then be imported as follows:

  Oct 31, 2020 Read more...

• Translating Data Types Between Elixir and Python (when using Erlport/Export)

  As explained in my original post on connecting Python with Elixir, there are some data translation issues that we will have to deal with when interfacing between the two languages. Thankfully, the Erlport documentation kindly provides a full table of the data type mappings, which we can now use to make our lives easier. Translating On The Python Side When calling Python from Elixir, we will want pass our arguments as so:

  Oct 31, 2020 Read more...

• Using Recursive Functions for Ecto Query Building

  Composability is the name of the game when it comes to writing Ecto queries. With such a beautifully designed DSL given to us, we should make full use of its design to build our queries. A Brief on Recursive Functions Recursive functions are functions that call themselves. There is the risk of functions becoming infinite loops if they are not given exit conditions. Here's an example: def eat(food) when food == "biscuits" do eat(food, "water") end def eat(food) do eat(food, nil) end # return the final digestable result def eat(food, drink) do {food, drink} end In the example, we keep calling the eat function until we end up with a digestable form of input, a food input and drink.

  Sep 16, 2020 Read more...