## A specific trick and a general habit for achieving fast computations

December 15, 2016

I recently worked on a computation involved in a client-facing projection graph. In order to delight our users, we wanted it to respond instantly to user interaction. However, there are two forces at play that make the calculation complicated: the consistent contributions of recurring deposits and the erratic motion of stock prices. We needed to… Read more

## How to Make Your Persistent Queues Run Faster Safely

May 04, 2016

What is a Persistent Queue? A persistent queue is a list of objects that persist in the database waiting to be polled and processed in some way. Usually it is a table that has columns for data, timestamp of when the object persisted, and timestamp of when the object is polled. As opposed to an… Read more

## What’s your stock portfolio return?

March 03, 2011

Consider the following scenario: you invest your money starting with $100K in a brokerage account, and buy some AAPL shares at$200. Then you transfer $5K more into the account and buy some AMZN shares at$120. Later on you sell your APPL shares when it reaches $300. In the end you transfer$10K out… Read more