What
· Technology
· · Quamina Diary
Q Numbers · This ongoing fragment describes how to match and compare numbers using a finite automaton, which involves transforming them into strings with the right lexical properties. My hope is that there are at least twelve people in the world who are interested in the intersection of numeric representation and finite automata ...
Epsilon Love · Quamina was for a time my favorite among all my software contributions. But then it stalled after I shipped 1.0 in January of 2023. First of all, I got busy with the expert witness for Uncle Sam gig and second, there was a horrible problem in there that I couldn’t fix. Except for now I have! And I haven’t done much codeblogging recently. So, here are notes on nondeterministic finite automata, epsilon transitions, Ken Thompson, Golang generics, and prettyprinting. If some subset of those things interests you, you’ll probably like this ...
[2 comments]
[2 comments]
Quamina v1.0.0 · Today I hit the “release” button on v1.0.0 of Quamina (introduction here), a fast open-source pattern-matching library in Go. Gotta keep doing some coding to keep me honest! The purpose of today’s piece is to provide a snapshot status report and record a few technology gripes just to get them off my chest; sharing is caring ...
Autumn Golang Diary · I’ve posted here about my experiences with Go since 2013 and I guess it’s too late to stop now. This one is truly miscellaneous, just a bunch of things that built up in “should write about this” notes to myself while working on Quamina ...
[2 comments]
[2 comments]
Hello, Ruler · Hey, look what’s been open-sourced: AWS Event Ruler! Check out the announcement blog. I built v1.0 of this Java library while I was at AWS, and wrote about it in Filtering Lessons. Tl;dr: It offers APIs for declaring pattern-matching Rules, as many as you like, then for presenting data records called Events and finding out which Rules each Event matches, very quickly. It’s in production in multiple Amazon (not just AWS) services, notably EventBridge. Also see: Content-based Filtering ...
Small Tables · Computer programs organize bits and bytes into “data structures”. In software of any import, the data structures are usually more interesting than the code around them. This part of the Quamina Diary takes a close look at a very simple data structure that I have greatly enjoyed using to build finite automata, and which I think has lessons to teach; it’s called smallTable ...
[3 comments]
[3 comments]
Making Code Faster · I’ve enjoyed writing software for 40+ years now. Lots of activities fall into that “writing software” basket, and here’s my favorite: When you have a body of code with a decent unit-test suite and you need to make it go faster. This part of the Quamina diary is a case study of making a piece of the library faster ...
[3 comments]
[3 comments]
Field-Value Automata · When I introduced Quamina, I described the core trick: You prepare an arbitrary JSON blob for automaton-based matching by “Flattening” it into a list of name/value pairs, then sorting them in name order. Today, a closer look at how you work with the flattened data ...
[3 comments]
[3 comments]
Golang Diaries: Generics · My coding time this year has been invested in Quamina, an event-filtering library implemented in Go. Just in the last couple of weeks I spotted an opportunity to bring Go’s shiny new generics to bear, and not just anywhere, but for a central data structure. I got good results, but the process was sort of painful; I kept trying things that looked like they ought to work but didn’t. I’m sharing this tour through that experience because I’m a reasonably competent programmer with mainstream tastes and if I hit these bumps in the road others probably will too ...
[4 comments]
[4 comments]
Meet Quamina · No parent will name a favorite among their children. But I do have one among my brainchildren, my software contributions over the decades: The event-streaming code I helped build at AWS. After rage-quitting I missed it so much that over the last few months, I wrote a library (in Go) called Quamina (GitHub) that does some of the same things. This is about that ...
[4 comments]
[4 comments]
