www.marginalia.nu

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My name is Viktor. I’m a Swedish software engineer and hypertext enjoyer. Marginalia is a website I’ve built. It’s really almost a bunch of websites on a common theme. If you find yourself clicking a link and ending up on a page that looks completely different, that’s just how things are.

🌎 Marginalia Search on GitHub
🦤 @MarginaliaNu on Twitter
🦤 @marginalia@mastodon.social
📺 @ViktorLofgren on YouTube
✉️ kontakt@marginalia.nu on Email

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Recent Updates

2024-06-18 One year of solo dev, wrapping up the grant-funded work in log

A year ago I walked out of the office for the last time. I handed in my corpo laptop, said some good-byes, and since then I have been my own boss. This first year has been funded by an NLnet grant, which I’m in the midst of wrapping up. As of now, the work is all done, the final request for payment has been sent. There’s a similar last-day-of-school levity to both these events.

2024-05-26 Feynman's Garden in log

The best description of my problem solving process is the Feynman algorithm, which is sometimes presented as a joke where the hidden subtext is “be smart”, but I disagree. The “algorithm” is a surprisingly lucid description of how thinking works in the context of hard problems where the answer can’t simply be looked up or trivially broken down, iterated upon in a bottom-up fashion, or approached with similar methods. Feynman’s thinking algorithm is described like this:

2024-05-16 Experiment in Java native calls in log

I’ve experimentally replaced some of the Java implementations of quicksort and binary search with calls to C++ code, and saw huge benefits for the sorting code but the same or worse performance for binary search. The Marginalia Search engine is mainly written in Java, which is language that is good at many things, but not particularly pleasant to work with when it comes to low level systems programming. Unfortunately, a part of building an internet search engine involves database-adjacent low level programming.

2024-05-05 Using DuckDB to seamlessly query a large parquet file over HTTP in log

A neat property of the parquet file format is that it’s designed with block I/O in mind, so that when you are interested in only parts of the contents of a file, it’s possible to some extent to only read that data. Many tools are aware of this property, and DuckDB is one of them. Depending on which circles you run in, a lesser known aspect of HTTP is range requests, where you specify which bytes in a file to be retrieved.

2024-04-17 Query Parsing and Understanding in log

Been working on improving Marginalia Search query parsing and understanding. This is going to be a pretty long update, as it’s a few months’ work. Apart from cleaning up the somewhat messy query parsing code, a problem I’m trying to address is that the search engine is currently only good at dealing with fairly focused queries, they don’t need to be short, but if you try to qualify a search that is too broad by adding more terms, it often doesn’t produce anything useful.

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