Thursday 24 November 2022

Not an investment advice

For a few years I have replaced my job title in linkedin with "crypto devsecops unicorn". This was mean to communicate that I am not open for new adventures. Who would want to talk to someone with such a job title?

It didn't work, people kept contacting me for various offers AND most surprising to me: investment advice. I do not give investment advice, but I want to help you still. Here it is:

If you have a few ten-thousand dollars and you wonder what you should do with it, you have no idea after spending the whole lunchtime thinking about this, let me give you my ideas, you can probably find something in these:

  • Spend it on your family - for example on the education of your children
  • Learn something new
  • Help other people, help your parents for example
  • Save it for the bad days

If you have hundreds of thousands or millions to invest: talk to an investment advisor, a real one, not a random stranger on a social network who calls himself "crypto devsecops unicorn". Are you out of your mind? Crypto devsecops unicorn, what the...

Saturday 18 January 2020

Kotlin: Immutable Map.update

Kotlin comes with immutable collection interfaces, including map, list, set, etc...

Now with the immutable maps I often need to change just one value in the map and do calculations on that modified map. I do not simply need to set a new value, but rather calculate a new value from the old one. A good example could be adding a number to the stored value.

Let's see how it looks like in java, because everyone understands java.


 


Now as usual with java, this is anything but easy to read, but I hope you get the point. Kotlin can do a bit better by using the operators feature.



I hope it looks a bit better, but I did not find it expressive enough, and I have to do this a lot, hundreds of places in the source code. So I wrote an extension function for the Map type called update. This is how it looks



Initially the implementation of this Map.update was indeed simply based on the + (plus) operator function. However, I have noticed that there is a faster way to perform this operation, it is faster to map all the key-value pairs and replace the single value. The benchmark result shows significantly better performance:





To sum up, I think this is the relatively rare ideal case when a more human-readable, more expressive code is also better performing.