Month summary — January 2025

One of the issues of working with abstractions is that what you think may be logically true, isn’t.

Climbing the corporate ladder only to realize it was leaning against the wrong wall

Or “How I learned to start worrying and love privacy anonymity

Want a mechanical keyboard but don’t know where to start? We’ve got you covered.

Building your own VPN may sound technical, but with the right guidance, it becomes straightforward and highly rewarding.

Some engineering patterns that sound good but almost never work as intended.

You can stand out in a sea of mediocre guides by following a few simple rules.

… we show how to use Circuit Breaker from Resilience4j for handling cases other than HTTP calls. With that ~70 lines of code, we were able to significantly improve our response time to failures, redirect users to functioning payment providers, meet business requirements regarding reliability, and take the manual switching off of payment methods off from developers’ shoulders.

In my experience as either a software developer or a mentor for software developers, the buzz word “system design” has been popped up quite frequently. Actually, no matter for real-life software development or software engineering interviews, “system design” is right in the center of the stage.

Get ready to look like a hacker with me using these Linux terminal tools!

tl;dr - Since developers are our customers, we wanted them to have beautiful API keys. We couldn’t find a suitable standard solution so we made our own package - uuidkey - that you can use to encode & format UUIDs into human-readable keys. If you use UUIDv7, you can also decode the keys to store them as sortable, indexable IDs in your database.

I was horrified to find out that bash has hashmaps, and decided to write this note to tell you how to use them.

One framework I’ve referenced repeatedly is to break down team leadership into a few different categories of responsibility.

But there are great patterns to handle it…

The secret is technology which can detect the interference in radio signals created by someone walking into a room. This interference can then be used as a trigger to control the light bulbs in the same way as existing motion sensors.

Many people don’t understand database sharding, which could solve their difficulties. This article explains database sharding, its benefits, including ho

Last week, I built a tiny Linux system from scratch, and booted it on my laptop!

I often get asked what my favorite tools are and how I use them to get my work done, and I’m writing this both to answer that question, and also for me to just paste a link to this post next time I’m asked. Efficiency!

Having a working environment that’s as easy on my eyes as possible is of critical importance

A detailed analysis of ChatGPT search and Google’s performance across 62 queries, with scoring metrics and practical examples.

Let’s Cook Up Some Basic AI Automation Magic.

this article, I would like to bring closer a topic of AI Agents and demonstrate how to build an agent that can solve security challenges…

Sometimes, tests need temporary files or directories. You can do this in Python’s unittest with the standard library tempfile module.

This module provides an implementation of the heap queue algorithm, also known as the priority queue algorithm.

Heaps are binary trees for which every parent node has a value less than or equal to any of its children. We refer to this condition as the heap invariant.

Learn how to display Django messages as user friendly toasts with Htmx

Django’s Subquery expression is one of the most powerful tools in the ORM. The documentation does a good job of explaining it at a high level, but unless you have a decent understanding of SQL, you may not fully understand it’s power.

Learn how to show a modal with minimal Javascript in Django + HTMX

This article explores the basics of database indexing, its advantages and disadvantages, and how to apply it in a Django application.

👻 Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration.

Little helper to run CNCF’s k3s in Docker.

High-performance retrieval engine for unstructured data.

Real-time data ingestion and analysis are becoming increasingly critical for modern businesses, whether in retail, finance, or logistics.

In this guide, I’m going to show you how to create a CI/CD pipeline that automates the test and build of our application code, and then deploys to Google Cloud services.

But deploying on GKE is just the first step. The true challenge lies in ensuring your applications are accessible to users — securely, efficiently, and reliably. That’s where the magic happens!

Cloud Build and Cloud Deploy, in particular, are essential components for implementing a strong CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) pipeline.

All the free web templates you need for product, business, landing pages, blogs, portfolios, ecommerce, and admin dashboards.

How I Stay Sane Implementing Stripe

I am trying to describe complex matters in simple doodles!

Simon has been researching LLMs over the past two and a half years and documenting the results on his blog. He shares which models work best for writing Python versus JavaScript and compares coding tools and environments.

6.824 is a core 12-unit graduate subject with lectures, readings, programming labs, an optional project, a mid-term exam, and a final exam. It will present abstractions and implementation techniques for engineering distributed systems. Major topics include fault tolerance, replication, and consistency. Much of the class consists of studying and discussing case studies of distributed systems.

This course is an introduction to mathematical modeling of computational problems, as well as common algorithms, algorithmic paradigms, and data structures used to solve these problems. It emphasizes the relationship between algorithms and programming and introduces basic performance measures and analysis techniques for these problems.

Join me as we explore the world of Graph Theory with a focus on graph algorithms and using Python as a tool for mathematical research!