BlogDB

Building a tiny load balancing service using PID Controllers 🚘

Low and steady write rates can be misleading

A common mistake in system design interviews is to underestimate a low but steady write rate. Many candidates quickly dismiss a write rate of 1 request per second as insignificant, but this isn’t a...

Catching up with async Rust

In December 2023, a minor miracle happened: async fn in traits shipped. As of Rust 1.39, we already had free-standing async functions: pub async fn read_hosts() -> eyre::Result> { // etc. } …and a...

I Read Approachable Open Source

Previously: “Approachable Open Source” Available for Preorder, You Deserve a Tech Bookclub I wrapped up Brian’s Approachable Open Source earlier this month and really enjoyed it. I won’t spoil much...

You Deserve a Tech Bookclub

Inspired by Ethan Marcotte’s You Deserve a Tech Union book title — which is slotted as the next bookclub read — I wanted to talk about the ad-hoc casual bookclub that I’ve been doing for the past f...

Ten Favorite Photos I Captured in 2024

I purchased a Sony a7ii in 2023, while having zero understanding of the basics of cameras and photography. I recall being particularly confused about the exposure triangle , especially how aperture...

The books I enjoyed the most in 2024

Another year went by, and another batch of books was consumed. Just like I did last year, I want to share the ones that I enjoyed the most. But what kind of metric is that? Truth be told, it is not...

CodePen 2.0

Earlier this week I was listening to an episode of the Changelog & Friends podcast which had Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert from their podcast ShopTalk Show. During the conversation, CodePen “two poi...

Announcing a new chess bot - A0lite-js

I’m excited to share a project I’ve been working on - a TypeScript port of the a0lite chess engine. The original a0lite was created as a minimalist neural network chess engine, designed to be simpl...

Getting Clean From The Bean

Triumphs and travails while finding the ideal cup of home brewed coffee - up until its drastic downfall. Featuring almost exploding coffee machines and crows.

What's new for Berliners in 2025

Update: the 2026 version is live Every year, on the first of January, all sorts of things change in Germany as new laws come into force. Mostly, life gets more expensive, but there are some nice su...

Label-Studio: Annotate Text and Image Data for AI and ML training

A few months ago I used streamlit to build a simple UI, so I can collect manually labeled data for a LLM fine-tuning task at work. Streamlit is fine, but the full process of creating a nice UI with...

Being better

My epistemic breakthrough to better living A year and a half ago, I decided to go completely vegan. Actually, scratch that—completely plant-based. I only went vegan about a year ago1. It took six m...

My Bash Script Preamble Boilerplate

I’ve been writing Bash scripts for years and have slowly built up a boilerplate of sorts that I typically copy and paste into new scripts at the start. Hence a “preamble boilerplate.” If you just w...

Linkfest #28: Neolithic Octopuses, Weeping Trees, and a Forty-Year-Old Snowman

Hello! It’s time for "the opposite of doomscrolling” — or, my latest “Linkfest”, in which I painstakingly debone the entire Internet to extract its finest cuts of science, culture and technology, j...

Moon

In the vastness of empty space surrounding Earth, the Moon is our closest celestial neighbor. Its face, periodically filled with light and devoured by darkness, has an ever-changing, but dependable...

Mixing CEL and Protobuf for Fun

Pixi - Real World Usage

Managing dependencies and environments across multiple platforms can be a nightmare. That’s why I was thrilled to discover Pixi. I’ve previous talked about Pixi on LinkedIn/Twitter, but haven’t use...

🎉 Sandboxels v1.10.2 - Birthday Update OUT NOW ⛄️

Long-awaited additions and polish to celebrate this year's Sandboxels anniversary.

16-bit BGP Community Architecture

There are a lot of reasons a network engineer might use a 16-bit BGP community tag in an enterprise environment. It can be forced from pre-existing constraints and overcoming technical debt while s...