Category Archives: Uncategorised

Scala’s uniform object model

Scala is functional and object-oriented. In a way, Scala is more object-oriented than Java as it has a uniform object model similar to Smalltalk’s. So what is this uniform object model? In a nutshell: every value is an object and every operation is a method call. That’s right, there are no primitive types, i.e. 1… Read More »

Microservice boundaries

Although working with microservices delivers many benefits, experience has shown that there are also some problems associated with their use. It is important to be aware of these issues so that their impact can be minimised. One of these problems is getting right the boundaries of microservices. This has proved to be one of the… Read More »

Linear programming with Python

A linear programming problem may be defined as the problem of maximizing or minimizing a linear function subject to linear constraints. The constraints may be equalities or inequalities. Here is a simple example: find numbers x1 and x2 that maximize the sum x1 + x2 subject to the constraints x1 ≥ 0, x2 ≥ 0,… Read More »

AWS Latency Index

In modern web applications, it is of paramount importance to deal with latency correctly.   Within an application, latency reveals itself at many different levels and with very different values. Computer latency at a human level is a good reference to understand the different timescales. It is clear that  the dominant term, by large, is the… Read More »

From Functional to Imperative programming

In http://63.33.192.41/the-power-of-generic-algorithms/, we mentioned the need of taking into consideration the physical limitations of time and space when writing an algorithm. In this post, we will show how the anatomy of an algorithm varies as successive optimisations are added. This change is reflected, especially, in the shift from a functional to an imperative style. As we… Read More »

Statistics for Machine Learning

One of the first things that one encounters when studying Machine Learning is a barrage of terms like: inferential statistics, statistical test, statistical hypothesis, null hypothesis, alternative hypothesis, p-value, probability distribution… and the list goes on and on. This may prove discouraging for those who are not familiar with Statistics. The present post aims to… Read More »