Combining Search Scores: Winning and Failing
Trey Jones at Wikimedia Foundation published some very interesting notes up about how to think about combining scores for search ranking (particularly Elasticsearch). I like this insight a lot:...
View ArticleSenator Bennet, your email address doesn’t work.
I emailed my Senator a few weeks ago to oppose Gorsuch being appointed to the Supreme Court. His response seems to indicate he thinks Trump nominees are still worthy of consideration. That’s an absurd...
View ArticleTop Five Posts from 2016
Most of this blog’s 40k visitors a year are looking at the epic Elasticsearch posts that I wrote years ago. For the most part they seem to still be relevant to people even if they are somewhat...
View ArticleNotes from The Printing Revolution
I’ve been reading The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Elizabeth Eisenstein on the transition of Europe from a scribal culture to a printing culture. In referencing Michael Clapham: A man...
View ArticleBash Your Day
For the past six months or so I’ve used a bash script to start my morning. The genesis of this idea was that I wanted to be more effective at prioritizing reviewing other peoples’ code and writing my...
View ArticleIs This Post True?
There’s a lot of discussion about what constitutes fake news, what impact it has, and whether blocking it is the bigger threat. I’d like to instead talk about the perception of truth. How do we change...
View ArticleTechnology Apathy
Someone is wrong on the Internet. Sure, personal apathy and sarcasm in the face of lots of people being wrong is understandable. Life is busy, and it takes a lot of energy to discuss something. But...
View ArticleStruggling with Content Ordering
I agree in freedom of speech. I agree in democratizing publishing. I agree with giving a voice to everyone with as small a barrier to entry as possible. I’m not sure anymore what I think about...
View ArticleNo Handlebars
Was listening to the Flobots earlier on a run. Feels very appropriate to be thinking about the impact of technology on society and how to do better. Uniform priors now seem much less appropriate to me...
View ArticleGreat Links to Lucene/Solr Revolution 2015
A great list of links to slides from Mani Siva’s blog. A lot of things I’m currently thinking about: overlaying graphs on Elasticsearch to do content re-ranking, improving search relevancy, what is...
View Article2014 In Review
Another year at Automattic, another 3 million emails sent to users to point them at their annual reports. This is my fourth year helping to send the annual reports, and as usual it makes for an...
View ArticleThe Walsh Standard v Automattic Creed
I’m reading Bill Walsh’s book The Score Takes Care of Itself on his methodology for getting the San Francisco 49ers to perform at a high level in the 1980s (and win 3 Super Bowls in the process), and I...
View ArticleOpenness, Supportiveness, and Leadership
In the Fall of 2015 I took the Emerging Leaders Program at the University of Denver. I really enjoyed the class. Gave me a great framework and space for thinking about how to improve my ability to lead...
View ArticleLearning About Modern Neural Networks
I’ve been meaning to learn about modern neural networks and “deep learning” for a while now. Lots to read out there, but I finally found this great survey paper by Lipton and Berkowitz: A Critical...
View ArticleSix Use Cases of Elasticsearch in WordPress
I spoke at WordCamp US two weeks ago about six different use cases I’ve seen for Elasticsearch within the WordPress community. I also mentioned two projects for WordPress.org that are planned for 2016...
View ArticleColemak: 0 to 40 WPM in 40 Hours
On April 1st my first child was born and I started a wonderful month of paternity leave. Holding a sleeping infant leaves you with lots of sleepy hours where its (sometimes) possible to do repetitive...
View Article2014 In Review
Another year at Automattic, another 3 million emails sent to users to point them at their annual reports. This is my fourth year helping to send the annual reports, and as usual it makes for an...
View ArticleElasticsearch: The Broken Bits
A post like this carries a heavy risk of this: Translation: “Your time is far less valuable than mine, open source slave.” pic.twitter.com/D1AkwxG5qg — Ryan Grove (@yaypie) August 5, 2014 So, some...
View ArticleScaling Elasticsearch Part 3: Queries
See part 1 and part 2 for an overview of our system and how we scale our indexing. Originally I was planning a separate post for global queries and related posts queries, but it was hard to break into...
View ArticlePresentation: Elasticsearch at Automattic
I gave a presentation at the Elasticsearch Denver meetup last night covering some of the bigger changes we had to make to scale a cluster to handle all WordPress.com posts. This is a cherry picked list...
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