When I introduce people to programming they sometimes feel overwhelmed by having to make things just right. They find that you have to be much more explicit with a computer than they are used to—in addition to the countless cryptic compiler messages. When you start throwing additional concepts at them, like type systems and memory management, […]
Introduction Magic: The Gathering (MTG) is a collectible card game released in 1993 and improved and expanded ever since by Wizards of the Coast (WotC, a subsidiary of Hasbro since late 1999). The game is notable for its complexity and design, a recent paper demonstrates that optimal play is at least as hard as the […]
It began with a flight that was delayed for over five hours in the Boston airport after the 2010 US Nationals. At the time, I only really knew C++ and basic terminal interaction. I cannot recall where the idea came from besides manipulating array elements. There was a 1 by 3 row of “bits”, and […]
Apache Spark is straight-forward to use when there are large files that need to be chunked up and read, but what about when you have many small files? In this post we’ll look at a way to address many small files and some parameter tuning to speed that up. The sample data we’ll be looking […]