Lifting Your Loads for Maintainable Elixir Applications
(This post was originally created for the Erlang Solutions blog. The original can be found here)
A Blog Post Toward a Programatically Generated Philisophical Language
“Wilkins! Yes! I’ve considered decorating these walls with some graffiti of my own, and writing it in the Universal Character.. but it is too depressing. ‘Look, we have invented a new Philisophical Language so that when we are imprisoned by Kings we can scratch a higher form of graffiti on our cell walls’”
I’ve been recently reading Neil Stephenson’s Quicksilver in which is a fictionalized account of the process of creating An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language. Part of the idea was to develop an alternative to Latin (widely used in learned circles) which wasn’t so arbitrary as Latin. The task which Wilkins set himself was to categorize and classify all entities, actions, methods, ideas, etc… known to humanity and to then organize them into a language in which words which are conceptually similar are formed as similar. It sounded sisyphean and foolish!
Then I wondered: “What if he had the power of computers and the resources of the modern internet”? At that point it started to sound less sisyphean and more like my kind of foolish.
Open questions:
- How would I group similar words together?
- The goal is to make similar words somehow similar in syntax, but how can we make sure they’re not too similar?
- Does it make sense for more common words to be shorter?
- How would words be generated / represented?
I plan on playing with / investigating this idea in a series of short posts as I go. I’ll also be making any source code available on my github account
2023
Can’t Live with It, Can’t Live without It
(This post was originally created for the Erlang Solutions blog. The original can be found here)
2021
How Far Can I Push a GenServer?
I’ve been using Elixir for a while and I’ve implemented a number of GenServers. But while I think I mostly understand the purpose of them, I’ve not gotten t...
Why I Love Lodash
I love Lodash, but I’m not here to tell you to use Lodash. It’s up to you to decide if a tool is useful for you or your project. It will come down to the n...
2020
Structuring an Elixir+Phoenix App
I’ve mix phx.new ed many applications and when doing so I often start with wondering how to organize my code. I love how Phoenix pushes you to think about th...
Expecting the Unexpected in Elixir
What can a 50 year old cryptic error message teach us about the software we write today?
2015
Using Graph Structure Record Linkage on Irish Census Data with Neo4j
For just over a year I’ve been obsessed on-and-off with a project ever since I stayed in the town of Skibbereen, Ireland. Taking data from the 1901 and 1911...
Analyzing Ruby’s ObjectSpace with Neo4j
Recently the continuous builds for the neo4j Ruby gem failed for JRuby because the memory limit had been reached. I wanted to see if I could use my favorite...
Master Data Management Scoring Examples
A while ago my colleague Michael suggested to me that I draw out some examples of how my record linkage algorithm did it’s thing. In order to do that, I’ve ...
Running a Neo4j Cypher Introduction Workshop
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Making Master Data Management Fun with Neo4j - Part 3
In my last two posts I covered the process of importing data from StackOverflow and GitHub for the purpose of creating a combined MDM database. Now we get t...
Making Master Data Management Fun with Neo4j - Part 2
In my last post I said I would “bring in another data source, show how I linked the data together, and demonstrate the sort of bigger picture that one can ge...
Making Master Data Management Fun with Neo4j - Part 1
Joining multiple disparate data-sources, commonly dubbed Master Data Management (MDM), is usually not a fun exercise. I would like to show you how to use a g...
Modeling in Neo4j Sans Programming
I have a bit of a problem.
Loading SQL to Neo4j Like Magic
When using neo4j for the first time, most people want to import data from another database to start playing around. There are a lot of options including LOA...
2014
Analyzing Twitter with Neo4j and Rails
Having recently become interested in making it easy to pull data from Twitter with neo4apis-twitter I also decided that I wanted to be able to visualize an...
neo4apis
I’ve been reading a few interesting analyses of Twitter data recently such as this #gamergate analysis by Andy Baio. I thought it would be nice to have a ...
Matchmaking Irish Citizens
I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together – The Beatles
Normalizing Religion in Ireland
When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, ‘Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or t...
A Blog Post Toward a Programatically Generated Philisophical Language
“Wilkins! Yes! I’ve considered decorating these walls with some graffiti of my own, and writing it in the Universal Character.. but it is too depressing...