Engineering

For months after TechGrub went quiet, people kept asking me what happened to it and when the daily posts would come back. I didn’t have a good answer. The honest one was: I just shut it down since it was a daily chore for me. So this week I sat down and rebuilt it. In this post, I want to share how it started, why it stopped, and how the new version works without a server, without costing anything, and without needing me every day. ...

About ten years ago, I started my career as a backend intern at a small company. Back then, the main product our team was working on was a multilingual hotel management software. After spending some time watching tutorials and practicing, the tech lead decided I was ready to contribute to the main project, so I officially joined the team. When I completed my first task, I nervously sent my pull request to my manager. Before even opening it, he asked, “Did you review it yourself?” I was a bit surprised and said no. He told me to go review my own code first, fix any issues that you found, and then send it back to me. He also suggested that I do these reviews before committing my code and introduced me to git diff for the first time. ...

In the generative AI era and with large language models, they say the only limitation is your imagination. So, as maybe you, I had some ideas to implement with LLMs, but I didn’t want to spend a lot on testing and validating my prototypes. So, I decided to run Llama, the Meta open-source LLM, on my machine or a VM to implement my prototypes with a free and self-hosted LLM. ...

Have you ever accidentally pushed a sensitive password and realized how difficult it is to ensure no one gains access to it? Or have you mistakenly logged an API token, and now it’s scattered across your logging system? In these cases, the first thing you’d do is change the secret. But what if you never caught the log in the first place? Or how can you be sure no one else has pushed sensitive data? This is where Secret Rotation comes in. ...

Some days ago, I received a final warning email about the expiry of the expedition-diaries.com domain. A few years ago, I set a challenge for myself to start a project and manage all its aspects like backend, frontend, and infrastructure on my own. I had experience in each of these areas separately but never had the chance to develop them together. Plus, I had different goals for each part: Backend (Go): I wanted to experiment with various libraries and architectures. Frontend (Vue.js): I wanted to refresh my knowledge. I also thought about giving React a try. Infrastructure: I was less experienced in this area and wanted to experience and learn some. Expedition Diaries One thing that mattered most to me was to create something useful, both for myself and others, and not just let it sit on my GitHub archive. ...

Introduction Some time ago, I was searching for a book related to software but not purely technical, making it easier for me to read. I was looking for something I could enjoy even with a busy mind after work. After checking my Goodreads to-read list, I decided to read The Clean Coder and started right away. The book’s introduction hooked me, and I ended up reading it to the end. ...

What Is Vector Search? We’ve come to understand searching as a job of comparing text. We grew up Googling things, looking up words in dictionaries, and finding book titles in libraries. But there are tons of other types of media packed with information we might need, like images, videos, and audio. What if you want to find a specific word in an audiobook, or you’re trying to locate a scene with a red Ferrari in action movies? That’s where vector search comes in. ...

Introduction When writing tests for a program, we often need to consider dependencies and external APIs that we prefer not to call every time the test runs. Calling these external dependencies not only adds complexity to our tests but also incurs costs. To address this issue, we can use test doubles. What Are Test Doubles? Test doubles offer an alternative to real dependencies. While we commonly refer to all of them as mocks, there are various test doubles, each serving different purposes. ...