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In a distributed setup where nodes share the load of processing requests and storing/retrieving data, reaching consensus is crucial to ensuring consistency in an application. To return to the concert ticket sales example from the last post, we wouldn’t want 2 users buying the same seat since that violates the condition of assigned seating. Consensus can then be described as ensuring all nodes agree on a specific value or a state in spite of a potential failure or delay; there lies the rub. ...

Demystifying Distributed Systems: the what and why If you deploy an app today, dealing with a distributed system is an inescapable problem. Whether it’s understanding how to balance requests, or synchronizing data replication, at least some aspect of your deployment will require orchestrating and coordinating multiple servers to operate in unison. The goal of “distributedness” here is to have things work across regions and systems in a way that is completely imperceptible to a user. ...

Today was a really hard day. I lost the man who raised me. The man who was there for all my milestones. We didn’t always agree but he had a heart of gold and was always there for his family, his friends, his neighborhood, his community. Words can’t begin to express the immense grief I feel. The grief I feel as I process this loss alone from the confines of a hotel room 5 miles away, 3 days shy of being released from quarantine, devoid of the ability to hug and be hugged. I’m not sure what the next few days or even weeks are going to look like, but I do know that I’ll get through this, eventually. But safe to say, that I’m not going to be ok for a bit. </3

Didn’t make a lot of progress today and decided to play around with shapes instead. Here’s a heart -> https://codepen.io/shortdiv/pen/zYxGQBm?editors=1010

Geometry is the basis for drawing any shape in ThreeJS. As I covered in earlier posts, geometry in ThreeJS consists of vertices and faces, which can be defined by hand in order to create custom geometry. Of course, this task of defining your own vertices and faces is ambitious and requires a firm understanding of how math works in ThreeJS—knowledge which I currently do not have. To keep things simple, ThreeJS offers default 3D shapes known as primitives so you don’t have to grok geometry to generate common shapes like spheres and cubes. ...

Most shapes in ThreeJS and WebGL can be created using primitives many of which, you can use to create composite geometries, like this really neat christmas tree. Creating complex and unique geometries however takes effort and can be difficult to achieve by simply compositing, mutating and ”extruding” existing primitives in ThreeJS. A better approach, as I highlighted in a previous post, is to utilize the methods like Geometry in ThreeJS that give you the flexibility of defining vertices and faces for custom polyhedrons. In addition to this, ThreeJS also offers support for working with curves and smooth surfaces. ParametricGeometry is example of such a method that gives you the ability to work with parametric surfaces, or surfaces which extend the idea of parametrized curves (fancy terms for bézier curves) to vector-valued functions of two variables—from my understanding this basically means a 3D non straight surface. ...

Walking at angles When drawing in 3D and even in 2D, we rely on shapes to make up a larger geometry, which then go on to form a more complex scene. This may seem rather straightforward but to a machine the task of drawing shapes could not be more complicated. This is largely because most machines only know how to render triangles. Take the humble square. Ordinarily, a square is drawn from point to point around the perimeter of the square, so in the figure below we’d draw a square from 1 → 2 → 3 → 4. From a computer’s perspective however, drawing a square would go 1 → 2 → 4 → 3. ...

Because we’re starting from the basics, this week we’ll focus largely on shapes and rendering shapes to the screen. This task may seem trivial but I assure you there’s a lot happening to occupy a week’s worth of content. To keep things simple, we’ll create our 3D images using ThreeJS, a JS library that abstracts a lot of the complexities of WebGL so you can write graphics with the power of JavaScript! ...

At the start of 2018, I got the opportunity to be part of the first mini batch at the Recurse Center. Recurse Center is a self-directed, community-driven programming retreat in NYC aimed at attracting programmers who want to grow their programming chops in a rigorous yet, supportive environment. Students who attend Recurse generally come in with a dedicated project focus. This helps with setting a course and creating a clear purpose through the course of the term, which lasts anywhere between 1 week and six months. During my time at Recurse, which lasted one week (hence mini), I focused on ramping up on WebGL. While 1 week was far too short to get anywhere near mastery, it did give me the space and time to navigate the vastness of core WebGL concepts and chart a semblance of a path to eventual mastery. If you’re curious about this and my learnings from my rather short stint there, check out my musings over on Github as well as my experiments with WebGL/GLSL—the furthest I got was rotating a triangle. ...

A key step in the data visualization process is the conversion of data to the right format. When working with geospatial related information in particular, data needs to be in geoJSON to be accurately superimposed onto a map. In many instances, geospatial data available via Open Data Portals like data.gov is already in a proper format to be mapped. However, there are times when the available data needs to be cleaned and/or transformed into a more appropriate format to be useable. For example, physical address data needs to be converted to coordinates so they can be properly added to a map. In cases like these, data formatters specifically known as geocoders come in handy. ...