NYC Systems

June 20, 2024 Talks

We are excited to announce the third night of talks in the NYC Systems series! Talks are agnostic of language, framework, operating system, etc. And they are focused on engineering challenges, not product pitches.

We are pleased to have Sujay Jayakar and Dan Harris speak, and glad to have Trail of Bits as a partner for the venue.

Elegant Full Text Search

Sujay is Chief Scientist and Co-founder at Convex, which means he writes a lot of code, helps ensure everything fits together elegantly, and comes up with wacky ideas for the future. He previously worked at Dropbox, working on backend infrastructure and desktop client file synchronization, and did a brief stint at Microsoft Research, where he worked on microsecond scale kernel bypass networking. Come talk to him about data structures, programming languages, and highly curated small food goods.

Talk info

As systems developers, we’re often scared of full text search and systems like Elasticsearch or Vespa. They’re often impenetrable black boxes of complex natural language rules, machine learning based heuristics, and sophisticated query planners. In this talk, I’d like to convince you that there are just a few core algorithms and data structures behind full text search and that these ideas are quite elegant.

Scalable analytics on dynamic, semi-structured data

Dan Harris is a Principal Software Engineer at Coralogix working on making sense of observability data at web scale.

Talk info

Columnar storage and memory formats such as parquet and Apache Arrow have proved their mettle when building OLAP systems but have some severe trade-offs when representing highly dynamic, semi-structured data. In this talk I will give a brief overview of the problem space and how we solved it at Coralogix while building a petabyte-scale OLAP engine.