Articles

The Leadership Lesson I Learned from a Coffee Shop

I walked into my neighborhood coffee shop for my regular Americano, but walked out with a lesson, a leadership lesson. Let me explain. The Beginning This coffee shop opened here in my town around three years ago. Since then, I have become a regular customer. If I have time in the morning, I just walk there, I’m even the first or second customer, I have my morning coffee and walk back home. That’s how I start my days. ...

An Introduction to StarRocks: My Experience Using It (Plus My Docker Setup)

An Introduction to StarRocks: My Experience Using It (Plus My Docker Setup) I’ve been working on projects including StarRocks for the last couple of years. When I first used it, that shocked me how lightning-fast the queries are. I decided to write an article about StarRocks. This article will serve me as future notes too ;) Let’s dive. Table of Contents What is StarRocks? My Journey with StarRocks 2.1. Key Features That Makes StarRocks StarRocks Why Choose StarRocks? 3.1. Performance That Matters 3.2. Cost-Effective Scaling 3.3. Real-World Use Cases Architecture Deep Dive 4.1. Frontend (FE) Nodes 4.2. Backend (BE) Nodes Getting Started with StarRocks Using Docker 5.1. Quick Setup Guide 5.2. Repository Features Your First StarRocks Query Advanced Features to Explore 7.1. Materialized Views for Acceleration 7.2. Real-Time Data Ingestion 7.3. Window Functions for Advanced Analytics Performance Optimization Tips Monitoring and Operations 9.1. Key Metrics to Track 9.2. Backup and Recovery Community Conclusion 1. What is StarRocks? We can define StarRocks as high-performance analytical database designed for online analytical processing (OLAP) workloads. It was forked from Apache Doris but it has evolved into a powerful solution. ...

Understanding SIMD Performance: A Developer's Introduction with Real Benchmarks

Table of Contents Introduction SIMD Implementation Fundamentals 2.1 AVX2 and 256-bit Registers 2.2 Memory Alignment Considerations 2.2.1 Unaligned Memory Access (Inefficient) 2.2.2 Aligned Memory Access (Efficient) 2.3 Loop Unrolling Technique 2.4 Compilation Requirements SIMD in Practice: Dot Product Case Study 3.1 Four Implementation Approaches 3.1.1 Scalar Implementation (Baseline) 3.1.2 Basic SIMD Implementation 3.1.3 Unrolled SIMD Implementation 3.1.4 Aligned SIMD Implementation Performance Analysis: Benchmark Results 4.1 Compilation Methodology 4.2 Results with -O3 Optimization 4.3 Results without -O3 Optimization 4.4 Compiler Optimization vs Manual SIMD: Key Insights 4.4.1 Compiler Auto-Vectorization is Remarkably Effective 4.4.2 Manual Optimization Value Depends on Context 4.4.3 Memory Hierarchy Effects Persist Regardless Conclusion & Practical Takeaways 5.1 Key Practical Takeaways 1. Introduction Do you keep hearing SIMD but don’t know what it is all about? Here is an article for you. SIMD is the go-to technique for squeezing every ounce of performance from modern CPUs. The promise of SIMD is: process 8 floating-point numbers simultaneously instead of one and in theory that will achieve 8x speed. That is just theory because there are other parameters that impact the results. ...

Building an End-to-End Chat Bot with ONNX Runtime and Rust

Table of Contents Introduction Prerequisites Project Setup Architecture Overview Exporting Models to ONNX Loading an ONNX Model Text Generation Pipeline Building the CLI Chat Interface Going Further Conversation Memory Temperature & Top-p Sampling Streaming Tokens Performance Optimizations Testing Deployment Considerations Conclusion TLDR ...

Envelope Encryption: The Security Pattern Every Cloud Developer Should Know

When building cloud applications that handle sensitive data, encryption isn’t optional, it’s essential. But there’s an important difference between just doing the basic encryption vs. implementing it correctly at scale. In this article, we’ll explore envelope encryption, a pattern that AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure all use internally and recommend for production applications. Table of Contents What Is Envelope Encryption? The Problem with Direct KMS Encryption The Envelope Encryption Solution Why This Is Superior Production Implementation with Google Cloud Prerequisites: Set Up Infrastructure Production-Ready Implementation Best Practices Common Pitfalls to Avoid Conclusion What Is Envelope Encryption? Envelope encryption is a cryptographic pattern where you use two layers of keys: ...