NextRoll

‘Cali or Bust’. Anyone in the math faculty’s co-op program at the University of Waterloo can tell you what that means – wanting to land a sweet internship in California or nothing at all. I’m currently in my 4th co-op (out of 6), and since my first application period, I had become accustomed to the norm of dreaming about a term in California.

We recently open-sourced python-hll, which is an implementation of HyperLogLog whose goal is to be storage compatible with postgresql-hll, js-hll, and java-hll.

When solving problems that are people and process oriented, can engineering methodologies be used? Below are our findings!

HyperLogLog (HLL) is a useful and interesting probabilistic data structure used to count unique values in a given data set with good accuracy and speed. Having this data type in a PostgreSQL-compatible Relational Database system fulfills various reporting needs to measure metrics like unique visitors.

We recently decided to sponsor the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation. Learn more about it, the reasons behind our sponsorship, and the other ways in which we’re contributing with it.

In celebration of International Women’s Day 2019 and National Women’s History Month, we’re continuing our tradition of highlighting Tech Women at AdRoll Group.

Dialyzer is a great tool to validate Erlang code, but it might slow down your development process if devs are applying it to huge codebases constantly. That’s why we added it to our CI pipelines instead. In the process we learned a few things that might be useful for you as well.

Grace Hopper is happening on October 2-4 2019 and the Call for Participation, Abi Award nominations, and Scolarship applications are now open! Here is why we love Grace Hopper.

DynamoDB is a very powerful tool to scale your application fast. The Autoscaling feature lets you forget about managing your capacity, to an extent. By replacing this algorithm with our own, we were able to reduce costs significantly.

This post examines how our clearing prices compare to our bid prices in what are supposed to be second-price auctions. We observe some irregular patterns that lead us to question whether these auctions really are second-price, and explain our algorithmic defense against misspecified auction mechanisms.