technical

Eventually their database became a ticking time bomb ready to explode at any moment. The first instinct might be to beef up their Postgres instance, like me trying to get big at the gym. But there are physical limits to how much you can scale a single machine before costs increase exponentially. Moreover, query performance and maintenance processes

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Sounds fancy. Why do we care? GAR involves taking the source documents and having an LLM enrich them, prior to indexing. For example, the LLM might... * Generate titles for documents that are missing them * Standardize author names/formats* Extract dates, URLs, citations and other elements that might be valuable to search as separate fields* Create... See more

In my experience I get those benefits when testing at the system/use case level but not when doing unit tests. At that higher level automated tests works wonderfully. I haven’t had a bug in production for 5+ years because of test automation. Which means that I spend 95% or more of my time adding new features or optimisations instead of bug hunting

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As a developer for 40+ years, I could not live without tests. I think unit tests are one of the great inventions of our trade. For mey they are part of developer accountability. Tests give me security, they tell me things are right. All tests running green gives me a warm feeling and makes me proud. Whenever I write more tests for existing code, I

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We get stuck in a holding pattern when we believe there’s only one path, or two, instead of those millions of paths that fork and diverge based on our individual strengths and characters. In some worlds you’re happy and curious and feed the parts that make you fully and idiosyncratically yourself. The parts that seek beauty and truth and goodness a

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