Nicolay Gerold

Idempotency is a concept that is important for programmers to understand, especially those working on building distributed systems. In simple terms, idempotency means that if you perform an operation multiple times, the end result should be the same as if you had only performed it once.

In other words, an idempotent operation is one that can be... See more

Optimizing Further

Creating so many indices and aggregating so many tables is sub-optimal. To optimize this, we employ materialized views, which create a separate disk-based entity and hence support indexing. The only downside is that we have to keep it updated.

CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW search_view AS

ᅠᅠSELECT c.name FROM company c UNION

ᅠᅠSELECT... See more

• ingress-nginx: Ingress controller for Kubernetes. It provisions NGINX services to load balance traffic to my pods. It also manages a Network Load Balancer (NLB) on AWS which controls ingress to the cluster nodes. It handles unhealthy nodes and traffic shaping for me. Rock-solid and has a huge community.


• cert-manager: It automatically issues and

... See more

Almost every company I talk to, and basically every solution vendor, has been pushing for people to use AI to “talk-to-your-data,” an approach allows the AI to retrieve content from a company’s proprietary databases and then work with the documents and data it retrieves. The problem is that AIs hallucinate, or make up plausible information, all the... See more

Ultimately, your goal in a 1:1 meeting is to build a relationship with another person and have vulnerable and critical conversations that enable you to help them do their best work. If your direct report has a broad agenda, that s great, start there. However, if their agenda is consistently limited to tactical in-progress work items and you're not... See more

promptfoo is a tool for testing and evaluating LLM output quality.

With promptfoo, you can:

Systematically test prompts & models against predefined test cases

Evaluate quality and catch regressions by comparing LLM outputs side-by-side

Speed up evaluations with caching and concurrency

Score outputs automatically by defining test cases

Use as a

... See more

Welcome to Quartz 4

Jun 13, 20242 min read

Quartz is a fast, batteries-included static-site generator that transforms Markdown content into fully functional websites. Thousands of students, developers, and teachers are already using Quartz to publish personal notes, websites, and digital gardens to the web.

🪴 Get Started

Quartz requires at least Node... See more

Expo is a tool similar to Vite, but for making mobile React apps. It has great features like fast refresh, and with Expo Go, you can easily run your project on your own device as you develop it. Expo is making it easier to take your mobile code base and also deploy it to the web.

This is the end goal of other projects such as Tamagui , which you... See more

ETL

The part of the system I'm most proud of, and on which I spent the most effort, is the ETL process.

We had a series of shell scripts for each data source we ingested (there were many), which would pull the data and put it in an s3 bucket.

Then, early in the morning, a cron job would spin up an EC2 instance, which would pull in the latest ETL code... See more