OKRs hierarchy: example for a MVP
October 12, 2020OKRs hierarchy: how do you set goals and keep alignment from company to department?
October 12, 2020
Quickly debugging Postgres problems
August 15, 2020Uh-oh! something just happened One of these queries might quickly narrow down a problem with your Postgres database. With a little luck, the…
Easy EC2 SSM with Pulumi in Typescript
May 28, 2020After watching this talk from Luke Hoban, I wanted to give it a spin. Hoban’s analogy of current tools as Assembly language of the could…
Speeding up json processing in go
May 17, 2020We will be speeding up our JSON processing by 11x with a few tricks: reusing allocated memory the Flyweight pattern JSON parsing without…
Compression with Brotli CGO in Alpine Docker
April 22, 2020Both Uber and Lucidchart have detailed breakdowns of gains by compressing JSON payloads and I wanted to give high compression a try with…
Deploy an EC2 to run Docker with Terraform
April 18, 2020So you have a Docker container running locally and you want to run it in the cloud. Terraform makes it easy to quickly set up the cloud…
Object Fingerprinting for Efficient Data Ingestion
March 25, 2020We are going to cut our write payload down by 95% for our very specific example. What happens when you frequently receive a payload for an…
Docker dynamic environment variables
February 15, 2020You might have a use case to dynamically add environment variables to docker containers. If you have ephemoral hosts and using something…
TLA+ verifying a money transfer
December 07, 2019What could go wrong with transferring money between two accounts? I have written about how easy it is to get wrong (giving away or losing…
Rust, wasm, and tetris
November 17, 2019WASM has been making a lot of progress recently so I was looking for a small project to run through and tetris with rust came to mind. Its…
Screenshot Blur as Lockscreen on OSX
October 22, 2019Take a screenshot, blur it, and use it as the screensaver with a little lock icon on top.
Insert speed and Postgres indexes
October 17, 2019Adding too many indexes has a cost, we are going to run through some example data and what size of an impact it looks like A common rules of…
Web authorization with Casbin
August 16, 2019Casbin is an authorization library that supports ACL, RBAC, ABAC permissions on resources. If you are not familiar with those terms, we will…
Imagining better flaky test management
June 30, 2019If we imagined better tooling around managing flaky tests what could we come up with? One thing I have noticed in working with polyglot that…
Golang custom error types with stack trace
April 28, 2019Golang error handling is fun because it is a first class citizen in the language, but the built in behavior is bare bones. But there are two…
Web authorization with Open Policy Agent
April 28, 2019So maybe you upgraded our authentication logic to no longer be a system bottleneck but now find authorization slowing you down, or have…
What does an effective team look like
April 17, 2019If you are building an effective team, do you know what you are building towards? Is it more than just putting smart people in a room…
What makes a great engineering manager
March 26, 2019‘What makes a great engineering manager?’ is a question I hear getting asked a lot by both new and experienced managers. On the new manager…
4 Types of work
March 23, 2019If you find yourself doing lots of work constantly but seemingly unable to get the things done that you planned to, categorizing work may…
Effective coaching
January 28, 2019There is a really good chance you are not getting effectively coached, and you are not giving effective coaching. Has a peer come to you…
gke ssd helm
January 28, 2019By default GKE does not use SSD for Persistance Volumes (PV), which is a little annoying since that is usually what I am looking for. I…
Golang finding memory leaks
October 29, 2018We are going to look at finding memory leaks in golang using a tool called pprof. As a quick refresher, a memory leak is when an application…
Container from scratch
September 12, 2018We are doing to be building a docker from scratch, and I do not mean a Dockerfile from scratch, I litterally mean the container. Getting…
Declarative Programming with Prolog
February 11, 2018Prolog is a declarative language around logic programming, where we can specify the rules and facts of a problem and let the language…
Lost messages with sidekiq
January 28, 2018Sidekiq is a great library for getting asynchronous library for quickly moving work into background jobs in Rails/Ruby apps, but it can drop…
Debugging slow PostgreSQL queries
January 04, 2018If production is on fire from slow queries, the quick command to identify them is: The above command will output any queries that have been…
Graph queries with Cypher in Neo4j
January 03, 2018Neo4j uses a declarative language called Cypher, that lets us easily make graph style queries that return some pretty cool data. We will be…
Neo4j bulk data import
January 01, 2018Neo4j has a csv import tool that makes importing large datasets pretty easy, especially if you happen to be exporting data out of postgres…
Building a leaderboard with redis
December 24, 2017Leaderboards can be cumbersome to build, especially building one that can scale past millions. Fortunately Redis has built-in data type that…
PostgreSQL pivot tables, selecting has-many relationships
December 16, 2017PostgreSQL has a useful function called that makes selecting ‘has many’ data associations pretty easy. In our example we have contacts who…
Preventing RabbitMQ dropped messages with an Outbox
December 10, 2017If you have dropped messages after introducing RabbitMQ (or another messaging tool) then this is for you, a quick example on the most common…
Interactor Pattern: Keep your rails app skinny
May 23, 2016Ever struggled with where where to stick your Rails app logic? or had controllers and models getting big? When I first started with rails…