sidmitra
Joined 18 years ago
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Member since
Dec 23
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
Hitchhikers guide was a personality defining read for me when i was younger.
I also recommend this video:
Parrots, the Universe and Everything
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc
Just this week i was looking for more humour writing like Douglas Adams, PG Wodehouse. I came across this award which seems interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollinger_Everyman_Wodehouse_P...
I plan to read some of them this year.
Comment · 2 years ago
Culture is mostly generational habits, learnings, hacks etc. Poverty and scarcity for generations could scar people into adopting certain habits as a way to survive; and it can be eradicated if the causal conditions go away and others take its place.
Comment · 2 years ago
I love gevent, but i never was 100% sure that nothing is secretly breaking or some weird thread safety issue. In a large SaaS app all sorts of 3rd party libs do weird background threading stuff or someone randomly starts doing threading.Local and shared global context. After hitting some weird hanging redis-py client issues, i turned gevent off and it went away. Never really got around to spend time to debug the issue(especially since it happened on prod and hard to replicate on stage/local).
Does your app have a lot of dependencies that do background threads? Like Launchdarkly(feature flags), redis, spyne(rpc) and on and on.
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago
Easier said than done :-)
Tests might cover more code than a single unit owned by different teams, thus end up with multiple owners. Prefer "squads" as the owners rather the individuals.
But just like documentation the ownership might be stale and out of sync. So the idea would be let some reds in SLO dashboard correct them over time. It's not possible to automatically link "tests" to the "code" always.
Comment · 2 years ago
I've had success with strategies at introducing some abstractions/patterns at my current place(doing this alone for a enterprise SaaS company with 200-ish devs). It's weird that we don't teach these or talk about them in software engineering(AFAIK). I see them being re-invented all the time.
To borrow from medicine: First step is to always stop the `stop the hemorrhage`, then clean the wound, and then protect the wound(or wounds).
- Add a deprecation marker. In python this can be a decorator, context-manager, or even a magic comment string. This i ideally try to do while first introducing the pattern. It makes searching easier next time.
- Create a linter, with an escape hatch. If you can static analyse, type hint your way; great! In python i will create AST, semgrep or custom ones to catch these but provide a magic string similar to `type: noqa` to ignore existing code. Then there's a way to track and solve offending place. You can make a metric out of it.
- Everything in the system as to have a owner(person, squad, team or dept). Endpoints have owners, async tasks have owners, kafka consumers might have owners, test cases might have owners. So if anything fails you can somehow make these visible into their corresponding SLO dashboards.
The other alternative to this last step is "if possible" some platform squad can take over and do this as zero-cost refactor for the other product squad. Ofcourse the product squads have to help test/approve etc. It's an easier way to get people to adopt a pattern if you do it for them. But the ROI on the pattern has to be there, and the platform squad does get stuck doing cruft thankless work sometimes. If you do this judiciously the win might be thanks enough, like more robust systems, better observability/traces, less flaky tests etc. etc.Comment · 2 years ago
https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/colorschemes/
^ There's a host of built-in color schemes.
Comment · 2 years ago
While agreeing somewhat with the post above, the answer isn't really so black and white but depends on your context, i.e. scale, app-complexity, search needs, data size etc.
>the fulltext tool, can and should hold only 'active' data
Same can be said about your DB. You can create separate tables, partitions to hold only active data. I assume materialized views are also there(but never used them for FTS). You can even choose to create a separate postgres instance but only use it for FTS data. The reason to do that might be to avoid coupling your business logic to another ORM/DSL and having your team t learn another query language and its gotchas.
> as data size is smaller, it better fits in RAM
> as data size is smaller, it better fits in RAM
> as the indexed data are mostly read-only, the VM where it runs can be relatively easily cloned
> as the indexed data are mostly read-only, the can be easily backup-ed
> as the backups are smaller, restoring a backup can be very fast
Once the pg tables are separate and relevant indexing, i assume PG can also keep most data in memory. There isn't anything stopping you from using a different instance of PG for FTS if needed.
> as FTS tools are usually schema-less, there is no outage during schema changes
True. But in practice for example ES does have schema(mappings, columns, indexes), and will have you re-index your rows/data in some cases rebuild your index entirely to be safe. There are field types and your querying will depend on the field types you choose. i remember even SOLR did, because i had to figure out Geospatial field types to do those queries, but haven't used it in a decade so can't say how things stand now.
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...
While the OPs point stands, in a sufficiently complex FTS search project you'll need all of the features and you'll have to deal with the following on search oriented DBs
- Schema migrations or some async jobs to re-index data. Infact it was worse than postgres because atleast in RDBMS migrations are well understood. In ES devs would change field types and expect everything to work without realizing only the new data was getting it. So we had to re-index entire indexes sometimes to get around this for each change in schema.
- At scale you'll have to tap into WAL logs via CDC/Debezium to ensure your data in your search index is up-to-date and no rows were missed. Which means dealing with robust queues/pub-sub.
- A whole another ORM or DSL for elasticsearch. If you don't use these, your queries will soon start to become a mish-mash of string concats or f-strings which is even worse for maintainability.
https://elasticsearch-py.readthedocs.io/en/v8.14.0/ https://elasticsearch-dsl.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- Unless your search server is directly serving browser traffic, you'll add additional latency traversing hops. In some cases meilisearch, typesense might work here.
I usually recommend engineers(starting out on a new search product feature) to start with FTS on postgres and jump to another search DB as and when needed. FTS support has improved greatly on python frameworks like Django. I've made the other choice of jumping too soon to a separate search DB and come to regret it because it needed me to either build abstractions on top or use DSL sdk, then ensure the data in both is "synced" up and maintain observability/telemetry on this new DB and so on. The time/effort investment was not linear is and the ROI wasn't in the same range for the use-case i was working on.
I actually got more mileage out of search by just dumping small CSV datasets into S3 and downloading them in the browser and doing FTS client side via JS libs. This basically got me zero latency search, albeit for small enough per-user datasets.
Comment · 2 years ago
>We build monuments for individuals not for committee.
That's the second time i'm hearing that quote today from completely unrelated sources.
The quote is from David Ogilvy, in case anyone is wondering.
"Search all the parks in all your cities; you'll find no statues of committees."
Comment · 2 years ago
>frequency of character triples
What are character triples? Are they trigrams?
Comment · 2 years ago
Disclaimer: I live in Chile, but not a Chilean national(nor of similar ethnicity), and certainly not a historian.
The dispute is seen differently in Chile and is not as simplistic as Chile invading a port. In general i've gotten the sense that the general populace believes that Bolivia(with its secret alliance with Peru) had other intentions.
>In February 1878, Bolivia increased taxes on the Chilean mining company Compañía de Salitres y Ferrocarril de Antofagasta [es] (CSFA), in violation of the Boundary Treaty of 1874 which established the border between both countries and prohibited tax increases for mining. Chile protested the violation of the treaty and requested international arbitration, but the Bolivian government, presided by Hilarión Daza, considered this an internal issue subject to the jurisdiction of the Bolivian courts. Chile insisted that the breach of the treaty would mean that the territorial borders denoted in it were no longer settled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific
>Ill-defined borders and oppressive measures allegedly taken against the Chilean migrant population in these territories furnished Chile with a pretext for invasion.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Chile/The-War-of-the-Pacifi...
Comment · 2 years ago
I second this, although i use `elpaca with use-package` instead:
https://github.com/progfolio/elpaca
It helps me keep the config consistent regardless of if something comes from MELPA, or bitbucket/github/gitlab etc.
- I also keep my config in README.org an github which shows the preview by default
- Org mode also helps me keep the commentary alongside. I can even just mark stuff as TODO, COMMENT with keyboard shortcuts. Infact if you read the source instead you'll find parts with COMMENT that don't render in the default preview on browser on Github.
- The git + github bits ofcourse help me use branches/PRs where i can test out stuff. Eg. most recently i was trying out lsp-bridge over eglot.
Here's my literate config: https://github.com/sidmitra/emacs.d
PS: Over time some bits have moved back to init.el to take precedence rather than everything in the org file.
Comment · 2 years ago
I don't know about Trello, but i understand why B2B SaaS have this problem.
The main issue is the ability to support various authentication systems, protocols, eg. Okta SSO, Google, Password, Mobile apps, Custom SAML and dozens of other enterprise-y stuff.
To be able to support that most apps do it as first step is ask for an email to be able to redirect them to the right flow. So the problem is bootstrapping how does a user confirm it's him before he can login to the right system.
Most B2B apps are forced to deal with this because there's no one protocol here, and different paying customers have different internal systems. Asking the user to choose from a dropdown of 20+ paths is proving to be impossible of the extremely high customer support costs.
It's a cycle of misery
Comment · 2 years ago
My building charges USD 40+ to replace the white rfid cards if you lose it and something similar for the remote control for the parking gate. So i just cloned all my cards and remotes and keep them as backup, just in case.
Comment · 2 years ago
There is also https://meldmerge.org/ which i've used on Linux and Mac before.
https://mastodon.social/@sidmitra @[email protected]