The Bloom filter cartoon by Valentin Deleplace

"Space-efficient probabilistic data structures" can sound... a bit daunting. A Bloom filter is very compact, and is only able to answer "No" or "Maybe". Hashing and probabilities are nice in theory, but what does the Bloom filter really do, and why does it really work? Let's find out with a fun animated example in a nightclub. Did you see the bandit enter? I'm a developer of backends, cloud architecture, performance, algorithms (big-O), databases, and UX. I love coding in Go. I work as a Developer Advocate for Google Cloud Platform.