Precision Engineering

I spent this entire week building admiring precision engineered systems. Systems with tolerances measured only in micrometres. Precision that defines the difference between life and death. Literally. I am talking about jets, like actual fighter jets.

For some context, my college is right next to an national air force station, and this week there was an air show happening. Now of course the government does not want any potential collateral damage and a PR crisis, so they asked my college to shut down for a week. Good for me; I would get a lot of time to work on my ‘database’.

Except I did not get that much done.

This week went by just as fast as the jets. My dorm is right behind the airbase — all I did was watch the F-35s and Su-57s perform a lot of insane maneuvers. As well as watch other planes fly in formation. The amount of precision required to pull it off — both for the pilots and the engineering team — it felt unreal at times.

Anyway, I wrote simple implementations for HLL and CMS in Go yesterday. I ran some very basic tests and the accuracy was pretty much as expected. Now I need to write working implementations to store the distribution sketch the top-k elements as well, and then find a way to connect it to the internet.

That’s all. I don’t have much more to write, since I didn’t do much else. The only other remotely productive work I got done was updating my notes to now include some basic git and networking stuff. Cya next week.