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Chris Tonkinson

tech {enthusiast, practitioner, leader, podcaster, mentor, entrepreneur}

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Refactored Podcast

I co-host Refactored, a casual, ongoing conversation between two technology leaders trying to suck a little less every day.

Career Schema Project

I founded the Career Schema Project with the mission of developing open standards and technology to reduce the hassle of online jobseeking.


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© 2021 Chris Tonkinson

Do you even compress.bro?


Google announced yesterday a new compression algorithm they call “Brotli.” They bill it as

… a combination of a modern variant of the LZ77 algorithm, Huffman coding and 2nd order context modeling…

I’m no compression expert but I do know that the Lempel-Ziv algirothm offers one of the best speed:compression ratios for practical use, and Google claims that Brotli operates approximately as fast as zlib while achieving compression ratios 25% better than their previous algorithm, Zopfli.

Point is, I sincerely hope this format takes off and that they choose .bro as the file extension. The tar-related jokes practically write themselves: “Do you even compress.bro?”