Posts

The book is a memoir of John Perkins who worked as an economic hitman.

Data Loaders allow transparent batching of requests to a data provider (e.g. database). More often than not, this leads to reduced latency and better performance without forcing an explicit batching of requests for the API users, for example, your frontend developers. Many programmers relate data loaders to Graph QL for N+1 query patterns. I believe data loaders are a great idea any time you are building an API backend. Let me illustrate the concept with a simple example. And while I am using Go as an example, data loader implementations are available in many languages.

Day 1 We started the trip with the Nobel Prize Museum, which comes with access to an interactive Audio Guide. It takes 2-3 hours to fully check it out. Then, we headed to the Swedish History Museum. It has free entry. And is good if you like checking out 1000-year gold jewelry. However, the Danish museum is superior to Nordic history. ...

Most startups think of the engineering stack as if it is a single cohesive thing. However, I believe that there are three different engineering stacks that are loosely coupled to each other.

Nillion and one-time pads

When Americans say spicy, they usually mean chili. For some weird reason, other spices that are more aromatic like Turmeric, cloves, cardamom, etc. do not seem to fit the definition of “spicy”. That’s why in a typical Indian/Thai restaurant in the US when the waiter ask how spicy, they mean “How much chili should I put in” However, when an Indian says that the spices were good, s/he usually means that the food had an aroma and a balanced composition of contrasting tastes. ...

The Mom Test is an intriguing book by Rob Fitzpatrick about how to do user research and validation of one’s product idea.

Guardrails are meant to protect us from tripping over. The same can be said about engineering guardrails.

Writing a blog post in plain text isn’t fun. Neither is writing it in a bulky word processor like Microsoft Word. The former is too constrained, the latter too unbridled. Writing in Markdown is fun. It has sufficient features without creating bloat. Building a backend in lambda functions has a strong lock-in. On the other hand, deploying web services on Virtual Machines (or physical machines!), while having little lock-in, is complicated. Docker, however, treads the middle path. Sufficiently robust without pulling in the complications of maintaining a full-fledged virtual/physical machine. ...

Day 1 Start the day with a free walking tour to get an idea of the important places and the history of the city. Then, we decided to check out the Gefion Fountain and one of the most disappointing tourist attractions, The Little Mermaid. ...