So, a few weeks ago I wrote a short snippet of code in Erlang that was kind of handy. I got a good response and people liked the little code snippet.
I’ve walked away a little bit from writing technical things, primarily because my days are full of being technical and I like writing about theatre a lot. Either way, one of the things that people always show off as an example is a toy map-reduce starter in Erlang, writing a parallel implementation of a map function. Yariv Sadan posed a pmap challenge , asking people to write a particular style of parallel in process mapper in Erlang (and to try in other languages).
One of the things that surprises me here is that a lot of these implementations are a little bit too complicated, and over engineer what most people will want to do: apply a function to a set of inputs. I think a simpler implementation would be possible, one that is more efficient, but with fewer guarantees. I’ll do a proper write up and talk about performance here. More soon, in other words, but just keep pmap in mind.
So the 2nd half: this post is just proof that creating content for blogs on a regular basis is hard. Really hard. I feel for journalists who have to come up with a column every day, or every week: coming up with an interesting topic is tough. It’s sometimes tempting for me to just go and futz around with the website instead.
I actually figure thats what can happen. Whenever I see a new format on a blog, I figure now “Oh, it probably means that they’re having a hard time making new content”. I did this too a few days ago, when I switched to a new web host. It was so much easier than writing a new post, something that could be interesting. Something that I’d want friends to see.
Speaking of which, I’m going to go and write some content.
Robert Schönberger
robert strudel schonberger dot org
