Field notes — essays & research notes

Things I've written down.

Ruby, Rails, performance, security and applied machine learning. Updated when something feels finished.

51 posts · page 6 of 6
RESEARCH 12 / 08 / 25

Taking over a stalled model: 49% to 77.7% recall

A skin-cancer classifier that looked fine on accuracy and was missing half the cases that mattered. Mostly a story about optimising the wrong number.

4 min
RUBY & RAILS 12 / 03 / 25

Three questions your monitoring should answer

Is it broken, what is slow, and why did this one request fail? Most setups answer the first and leave you grepping for the third.

2 min
BIG DATA 11 / 03 / 25

One line of PySpark, 34% off the runtime

Broadcast joins, two million records, and why Spark's default query plan is worth arguing with when you know something the optimiser doesn't.

4 min
RUBY & RAILS 10 / 22 / 25

The server was fast and the page still felt slow

Server time is a fraction of what a user experiences. The rest is fonts, images, and what the browser is blocked on.

2 min
RUBY & RAILS 09 / 16 / 25

Elasticsearch wasn't the problem. My queries were.

Halving search response time while raising result accuracy 35% — mostly by rewriting what I was asking for, not what I was asking it on.

4 min