Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande is a very engaging and enjoyable book about Gawande’s experiences as a medical resident, grouped by chapters on fallibility, mystery and uncertainty. In many of the cases, mystery and fear of fallibility contribute greatly to the uncertainty. As with some other specialized fields, outsiders… Read More »
In “Catastophic Care: Why Everything We Think We Know About Health Care Is Wrong”, David Goldhill does a very good job of laying out many of the biggest issues in US health care pricing, a field I actually happen to know a lot about. From his experience running a company and being on the board… Read More »
Several times I’ve downloaded an app and had OS X ask me the following every time I opened it: “TheAppName is an application downloaded from the Internet. Are you sure you want to open it? The first time, well, okay, but everytime? The trick is to remove the com.apple.quarantine extended attribute from the application’s directory.… Read More »
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea is a fascinating book on a topic that I previously knew almost nothing about. Barbara Demick very much deserved the National Book Award Finalist award. I first found out about this book when I went to the Goodreads office in San Francisco for a talk on their… Read More »
Yesterday I presented at NoSQL Now! 2013 in San Jose, CA, on how Castlight Health uses MongoDB to support low latency geospatial searches on huge amounts of health care pricing data. Given the number of parallel tracks and the total number of people attending sessions, I was pleased to get about 50 engaged people in… Read More »
My presentation at MongoDB Days SF on Friday went very well, though I got to the last slide of my 40-minute talk in just 30 minutes. Hopefully, I didn’t speak too fast for a lot of people. Fortunately, I remembered at the end that I had also wanted to talk about how I saved space… Read More »
I’m very excited that my talk proposal “Geo Searches for Healthcare Pricing Data” was accepted for MongoDB SF 2013. I’ll be speaking at 11:55 am on May 10th in the Palace Hotel Gold Ballroom about why I chose to deploy MongoDB at Castlight Health to serve large amounts of healthcare pricing data with very low… Read More »
After finishing Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s new book Lean In, I was surprised by the disconnect with some of the early criticism I had read. I actually thought Sandberg wrote a lot about her personal life and greatly appreciated her experience and co-workers at Google. She also clearly admitted she is in a place of… Read More »
At work we have a Java-based service that caches a very large amount of data. I spend a lot of time optimizing performance and memory usage for this service. The amount of memory it uses at runtime to cache a sufficient amount of data for performance reasons is now reaching the the 32 GB boundary.… Read More »
At work today I ran into a new reason for not keeping open MySQL connections for a long time. It involves dynamic session variables like long_query_time. I wanted to capture a couple of hours worth of all queries in the slow query log so I could analyze them with pt-query-digest from the excellent Percona Toolkit.… Read More »