Every once in a while, I find myself skimming through the MDN docs to jog my memory on how CORS1 works and which HTTP headers are associated with it. This is particularly true when a frontend app can’t talk to a backend service I manage due to a CORS error2. MDN’s CORS documentat … | Continue reading
Ever since Rob Pike published the text on the functional options pattern1, there’s been no shortage of blogs, talks, or comments on how it improves or obfuscates configuration ergonomics. While the necessity of such a pattern is quite evident in a language that lacks default argu … | Continue reading
Ever since Rob Pike published the text on the functional options pattern1, there’s been no shortage of blogs, talks, or comments on how it improves or obfuscates configuration ergonomics. While the necessity of such a pattern is quite evident in a language that lacks default argu … | Continue reading
In 9th grade, when I first learned about Lenz’s Law1 in Physics class, I was fascinated by its implications. It states: The direction of an induced current will always oppose the motion causing it. In simpler terms, imagine you have a hoop and a magnet. If you move the magnet clo … | Continue reading
In 9th grade, when I first learned about Lenz’s Law1 in Physics class, I was fascinated by its implications. It states: The direction of an induced current will always oppose the motion causing it. In simpler terms, imagine you have a hoop and a magnet. If you move the magnet clo … | Continue reading
These days, I don’t build hierarchical types through inheritance even when writing languages that support it. Type composition has replaced almost all of my use cases where I would’ve reached for inheritance before. I’ve written1 about how to escape the template pattern2 hellscap … | Continue reading
These days, I don’t build hierarchical types through inheritance even when writing languages that support it. Type composition has replaced almost all of my use cases where I would’ve reached for inheritance before. I’ve written1 about how to escape the template pattern2 hellscap … | Continue reading
While I like Go’s approach of treating errors as values as much as the next person, it inevitably leads to a situation where there isn’t a one-size-fits-all strategy for error handling like in Python or JavaScript. The usual way of dealing with errors entails returning error valu … | Continue reading
While I like Go’s approach of treating errors as values as much as the next person, it inevitably leads to a situation where there isn’t a one-size-fits-all strategy for error handling like in Python or JavaScript. The usual way of dealing with errors entails returning error valu … | Continue reading
Writing a retry function in Go usually involves mucking around with reflections and doing some metaprogramming magic. It’s fun to write, but whenever I come back to the code a few months later, I always cringe at the mess.Here’s a rudimentary Retry function that does the followin … | Continue reading
I used reach for reflection whenever I needed a Retry function in Go. It’s fun to write, but gets messy quite quickly. Here’s a rudimentary Retry function that does the following: It takes in another function that accepts arbitrary arguments. Then tries to execute the wrapped fun … | Continue reading
I used reach for reflection whenever I needed a Retry function in Go. It’s fun to write, but gets messy quite quickly. Here’s a rudimentary Retry function that does the following: It takes in another function that accepts arbitrary arguments. Then tries to execute the wrapped fun … | Continue reading
Despite moonlighting as a gopher for a while, the syntax for type assertion and type switches still trips me up every time I need to go for one of them. So, to avoid digging through the docs or crafting stodgy LLM prompts multiple times, I decided to jot this down in a gobyexampl … | Continue reading
Despite moonlighting as a gopher for a while, the syntax for type assertion and type switches still trips me up every time I need to go for one of them. So, to avoid digging through the docs or crafting stodgy LLM prompts multiple times, I decided to jot this down in a gobyexampl … | Continue reading
I’ve been a happy user of pydantic1 settings to manage all my app configurations since the 1.0 era. When pydantic 2.0 was released, the settings portion became a separate package called pydantic_settings2. It does two things that I love: it automatically reads the environment var … | Continue reading
I’ve been a happy user of pydantic1 settings to manage all my app configurations since the 1.0 era. When pydantic 2.0 was released, the settings portion became a separate package called pydantic_settings2. It does two things that I love: it automatically reads the environment var … | Continue reading
As of now, unlike Python or NodeJS, Go doesn’t allow you to specify your development dependencies separately from those of the application. However, I like to specify the dev dependencies explicitly for better reproducibility. While working on a new CLI tool1 for checking dead UR … | Continue reading
I love dynamically typed languages as much as the next person. They let us make ergonomic API calls like this: import httpx # Sync call for simplicity r = httpx.get("https://dummyjson.com/products/1").json() print(r["id"], r["title"], r["description"]) or this: fetch("https://dum … | Continue reading
While I tend to avoid *args and **kwargs in my function signatures, it’s not always possible to do so without hurting API ergonomics. Especially when you need to write functions that call other helper functions with the same signature. Typing *args and **kwargs has always been a … | Continue reading
I needed to integrate rate limiting into a relatively small service that complements a monolith I was working on. My initial thought was to apply it at the application layer, as it seemed to be the simplest route. Plus, I didn’t want to muck around with load balancer configuratio … | Continue reading
You can use @dataclass(frozen=True) to make instances of a data class immutable during runtime. However, there’s a small caveat—instantiating a frozen data class is slightly slower than a non-frozen one. This is because, when you enable frozen=True, Python has to generate __setat … | Continue reading
When I started my career in a tightly-knit team of six engineers at a small e-commerce startup, I was struck by the remarkable efficiency of having a centralized hub for all of our documents used for planning. We used a single Trello board with four columns—Todo, Doing, Q/A, Done … | Continue reading
I’ve always had a thing for old-school web tech. By the time I joined the digital fray, CGI scripts were pretty much relics, but the term kept popping up in tech forums and discussions like ghosts from the past. So, I got curious, started reading about them, and wanted to see if … | Continue reading
Despite using VSCode as my primary editor, I never really bothered to set up the native debugger to step through application code running inside Docker containers. Configuring the debugger to work with individual files, libraries, or natively running servers is trivial1. So, I us … | Continue reading
Data classes are containers for your data—not behavior. The delineation is right there in the name. Yet, I see state-mutating methods getting crammed into data classes and polluting their semantics all the time. While this text will primarily talk about data classes in Python, th … | Continue reading
Despite being an IC for the bulk of my career, finding my groove amidst the daily torrent of meetings from the early hours has always felt like balancing on a seesaw during a never-ending earthquake. Now, pair that with the onslaught of Slack inquiries and the incessant chiming o … | Continue reading
Despite being an IC for the bulk of my career, finding my groove amidst the daily torrent of meetings from the early hours has always felt like balancing on a seesaw during a never-ending earthquake. Now, pair that with the onslaught of Slack inquiries and the incessant chiming o … | Continue reading
Ever been in a situation where you landed a software engineering job with a particular tech stack, mastered it, switched to another company with a different stack, nailed that too, and then found yourself in a third company that used the original stack? Now, you feel like your sk … | Continue reading
Ever been in a situation where you landed a software engineering job with a particular tech stack, mastered it, switched to another company with a different stack, nailed that too, and then found yourself in a third company that used the original stack? Now, you suddenly sense th … | Continue reading
Adopting existing tools that work, applying them to the business problems at hand, and quickly iterating in the business domain rather than endlessly swirling in the vortex of technobabble is woefully underrated. I’ve worked at two kinds of companies before: One that only cares a … | Continue reading
Adopting existing tools that work, applying them to the business problems at hand, and quickly iterating in the business domain rather than endlessly swirling in the vortex of technobabble is woefully underrated. I’ve worked at two kinds of companies before: One that only cares a … | Continue reading
I like writing custom scripts to automate stuff or fix repetitive headaches. Most of them are shell scripts, and a few of them are written in Python. Over the years, I’ve accumulated quite a few of them. I use Git and GNU stow1 to manage them across different machines, and the wo … | Continue reading
There are a few ways you can add URLs to your markdown documents: Inline links [inline link](https://example.com) This will render as inline link. Reference links [reference link] Define the link destination elsewhere in the document like this: [reference link]: https://example.c … | Continue reading
I’m one of those people who’ll sit in front of a computer for hours, fiddling with algorithms or debugging performance issues, yet won’t spend 10 minutes to improve their workflows. While I usually get away with this, every now and then, my inertia slithers back to bite me. The l … | Continue reading
I’m one of those people who will sit in front of a computer for hours, fiddling with algorithms or debugging performance issues, yet won’t spend 10 minutes to improve their workflows. While I usually get away with this, every now and then, my inertia slithers back to bite me. The … | Continue reading
Every once in a while, I love browsing the Wayback Machine to catch a glimpse of the early internet. I enjoy the waves of nostalgic indie hacker vibes that wash over me as I type a URL into the search box and click to see an old snapshot of the site frozen in time. Being a kid of … | Continue reading
This site is built with Hugo and served via GitHub pages. Recently, I decided to change the font here to make things more consistent across different devices. However, I didn’t want to go with Google Fonts for a few reasons:CDN is another dependency. Hosting static assets on GitH … | Continue reading
Suppose, you have a function that takes an option struct and a message as input. Then it stylizes the message according to the option fields and prints it. What’s the most sensible API you can offer for users to configure your function? Observe:// app/src package src // Option st … | Continue reading
I was curious to see if I could prototype a simple load balancer in a single Go script. Go’s standard library and goroutines make this trivial. Here’s what the script needs to do:Spin up two backend servers that’ll handle the incoming requests. Run a reverse proxy load balancer i … | Continue reading
I was cobbling together a long-running Go script to send webhook messages to a system when some events occur. The initial script would continuously poll a Kafka topic for events and spawn new goroutines to make HTTP requests to the destination. This had two problems:It could crea … | Continue reading
A TOTP based 2FA system has two parts. One is a client that generates the TOTP code. The other part is a server. The server verifies the code. If the client and the server-generated codes match, the server allows the inbound user to access the target system. The code usually expi … | Continue reading
I love Go’s implicit interfaces. While convenient, they can also introduce subtle bugs unless you’re careful. Types expected to conform to certain interfaces can fluidly add or remove methods. The compiler will only complain if an identifier anticipates an interface, but is passe … | Continue reading
I enjoy writing about software—the things I learn, the tools I use, and the work I do. Owing to the constraints of the corporate software world, more often than not, you can’t showcase your work or talk about them. At least that’s how it always has been throughout my career. At t … | Continue reading
Before the release of version 1.21, you couldn’t set levels for your log messages in Go without either using third-party libraries or writing your own boilerplates. Coming from Python, I’ve always found this odd, considering that this capability has been in the Python standard li … | Continue reading
If you’re a manager, then there’s no shortage of information for you on how to conduct exit interviews. But there aren’t many resources that focus on how to handle them from an employee’s perspective. I’ve been meaning to write a quick piece that isn’t biased by anyone else’s exp … | Continue reading
The 100k context window of Claude 2 has been a huge boon for me since now I can paste a moderately complex problem to the chat window and ask questions about it. In that spirit, it recently refactored some pretty gnarly conditional logic for me in such an elegant manner that it a … | Continue reading
This morning, while browsing Hacker News, I came across a neat trick that allows you to share textual data by leveraging DNS TXT records. It can be useful for sharing a small amount of data in environments that restrict IP but allow DNS queries, or to bypass censorship.To test th … | Continue reading
Unless I’m hand rolling my own ORM-like feature or validation logic, I rarely need to write custom descriptors in Python. The built-in descriptor magics like @classmethod, @property, @staticmethod, and vanilla instance methods usually get the job done. However, every time I need … | Continue reading