Programming

Open AI is ditching TypeScript to rebuild Codex in Rust. This is a great example of why you should always ship tools as standalone static binaries using compiled languages. Reddit Comment The biggest advantage of such tools is not speed or efficiency. Rather, it is the ability to not install the full tool chain to just use a tool. Compiler provides additional safety check Compilation is an additional guardrail that reduces the likelihood of shipping non-functioning code. ...

There was recent news about 47% decline in the number of apps on Google Play Store. As a hobby Android developer, who has been developing MusicSync, a Google Play Music + Podcast replacement for the last five years, I thought I would share my experience of maintaining an Android app. And why this reduction in the number of apps is not surprising to me. ...

If you are running Python in production, you will almost certainly have to decide which web framework to use. Let’s consider a rudimentary Hello world based test comparing the performance of two popular web frameworks for Python - FastAPI and Flask. I will intentionally use Docker for benchmarking as most deployments today will explicitly or implicitly rely on Docker. For Flask, I will use this Dockerfile 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 # Build: docker buildx build -t python-flask -f Dockerfile_python . # Size: docker image inspect python-flask --format='{{.Size}}' | numfmt --to=iec-i # Run: docker run -it --rm --cpus=1 --memory=100m -p 8001:8001 python-flask FROM python:3.13-slim AS base WORKDIR /app RUN pip3 install --no-cache-dir flask gunicorn SHELL ["/bin/bash", "-c"] RUN echo -e "\ from flask import Flask\n\ app = Flask(__name__)\n\ \ @app.get('/')\n\ def root():\n\ return 'Hello, World!'\n\ " > /app/web_server.py ENTRYPOINT ["gunicorn", "web_server:app", "--bind=0.0.0.0:8001", "--workers=4", "--threads=32"] And for FastAPI, I will use this ...

My previous article recommended that one should reconsider using Python in production. However, there’s one category of use case where Python is the dominant option for running production workloads. And that’s data analysis and machine learning. Almost all bleeding-edge work in data analysis and machine learning, especially around LLMs, happens in Python. So, here are some of my learnings on how to run Python in production. ...

I started writing in the 2010s when Python 2 was going to be deprecated and Python 3 was too early to support. Python might have died there and then but was picked up by the data science and machine learning community, so, it survived. Running Python in production comes with various gotchas though. Python is resource-intensive Let’s consider a simple Docker image containing “Hello World”. ...

In MusicSync, one of the views became complex and too slow to be inflated on the UI thread. So, I decided to do some Pooling around it to inflate it on the background thread and use it on the UI thread. This made the UI snappier, reducing multiple-second load times when opening some folders. However, soon I ended up with an edge case where re-opening the activity (and not the app) led to a semi-functional app. This edge case is hard as it gets triggered only in particular scenarios where the user destroys the activity via swipe up. At the same time, the app keeps running due to the attached foreground service that’s playing the media. And on activity re-creation, I got stale views! ...

This is a story of a messaging app used by billions of users. The app followed an extremely strong model of privacy. The app never persisted the user’s data on the servers. All the communication is end-to-end encrypted. A lot of users of this app, especially, on Android would regularly uninstall and reinstall the app. Now, to prevent these users from losing messages, the messages were backed up to the user’s SD card. In the Android security model, an SD card is a public storage space, accessible to all apps. So, to keep messages private, the backups were encrypted. ...

Google Domains A year back, I had to migrate my domain after Google decided to shut down Google Domains. I had to, not only, painfully setup multiple side-projects subdomain mappings again on a new domain registrar but also re-verify my domain and re-create those mappings on Google Cloud Run. Google Container Registry Google Container Registry is shutting down in 2025. It has been replaced with a new project called Artifact Registry. So, why is Container Registry being shut down? Probably because it 10X cheaper than Artifact Registry. ...

I use Makefile for Android just like I use Makefile for my non-Android side-projects.

Android has two distinct navigation guidelines as opposed to iOS. Getting them right is nuanced.