Author Archives: Bryan Duxbury

Rapleaf makes extensive use of Thrift‘s CompactProtocol to save space for long-term data storage and for communicating between services. However, this summer, star Rapleaf intern Armaan Sarkar took us to a new level of compact-ness with his work on the new TupleProtocol. While we are completely happy with the CompactProtocol for permanent data storage and [...]

Last week was our quarterly Hackleaf, and this time around a handful of us set out to solve a slightly more physical problem than we usually tackle: conference room abuse. We have nine conference rooms in our office these days, and even though we regularly use Google Calendar to schedule meetings, we still struggle with [...]

One of the most interesting things that we do at Rapleaf is use our existing data to deduce or infer new data. For example, a person’s name is often highly correlated with a specific gender. After doing lots and lots of regression, we usually end up with a simple HashMap loaded from a file that [...]

Rapleaf started out using Ruby and Rails extensively to build out our systems. We loved the flexibility that it gave us to quickly put together a functional application. Tools like ActiveRecord are huge productivity boosters, saving us the trouble of hand-coding database interaction and letting us focus directly on our application. However, we evolved to [...]

We’re really excited to announce the open-source debut of a cool piece of Rapleaf’s internal infrastructure, a distributed database project we call Hank. Our use case is very particular: we have tons of data that needs to get processed, producing a lot of data points for individual people, which then need to be made randomly [...]