The 100k context window of Claude 21 has been a huge boon for me since now I can paste a moderately complex problem to the chat window and ask questions about it. In that spirit, it recently refactored some pretty gnarly conditional logic for me in such an elegant manner that it absolutely blew me away. Now, I know how bitmasks2 work and am aware of the existence of enum.Flag3 in Python. However, it never crossed my mind that flags can be leveraged to trim conditional branches in such a clever manner that Claude illustrated. But once I looked at the proposed solution, the whole thing immediately clicked for me. ...

This morning, while browsing Hacker News, I came across a neat trick1 that allows you to share textual data by leveraging DNS TXT records. It can be useful for sharing a small amount of data in environments that restrict IP but allow DNS queries, or to bypass censorship. To test this out, I opened my domain registrar’s panel and created a new TXT type DNS entry with a base64 encoded message containing the poem A Poison Tree by William Blake. The message can now be queried and decoded with the following shell command: ...

Unless I’m hand rolling my own ORM-like feature or validation logic, I rarely need to write custom descriptors in Python. The built-in descriptor magics like @classmethod, @property, @staticmethod, and vanilla instance methods usually get the job done. However, every time I need to dig my teeth into descriptors, I reach for this fantastic how to1 guide by Raymond Hettinger. You should definitely set aside the time to read it if you haven’t already. It has helped me immensely to deepen my understanding of how many of the fundamental language constructs are wired together underneath. ...

Python offers a ton of ways like os.system or os.spawn* to create new processes and run arbitrary commands in your system. However, the documentation usually encourages you to use the subprocess1 module for creating and managing child processes. The subprocess module exposes a high-level run() function that provides a simple interface for running a subprocess and waiting for it to complete. It accepts the command to run as a list of strings, starts the subprocess, waits for it to finish, and then returns a CompletedProcess object with information about the result. For example: ...

The current title of this post is probably incorrect and may even be misleading. I had a hard time coming up with a suitable name for it. But the idea goes like this: sometimes you might find yourself in a situation where you need to iterate through a generator more than once. Sure, you can use an iterable like a tuple or list to allow multiple iterations, but if the number of elements is large, that’ll cause an OOM error. On the other hand, once you’ve already consumed a generator, you’ll need to restart it if you want to go through it again. This behavior is common in pretty much every programming language that supports the generator construct. ...

Around a year ago, I ditched my fancy Linux rig for a beefed-up 16" MacBook Pro and ever since, it’s been my primary machine for both personal and work stuff. I love how this machine strikes a decent balance between power and portability. However, I often joke that this chonky boy is just a pound shy of being an ENIAC1. It’s a beast of a machine when you need all that power, but certainly isn’t the most convenient contraption to lug around while flying. I work fully remote, but can’t get any work done while traveling and rarely ever need to tap into the full power this thing offers. ...

Over the years, I’ve used the template pattern1 across multiple OO languages with varying degrees of success. It was one of the first patterns I learned in the primordial hours of my software engineering career, and for some reason, it just feels like the natural way to tackle many real-world code-sharing problems. Yet, even before I jumped on board with the composition over inheritance2 camp, I couldn’t help but notice how using this particular inheritance technique spawns all sorts of design and maintenance headaches as the codebase starts to grow. ...

One major drawback of Python’s huge ecosystem is the significant variances in workflows among people trying to accomplish different things. This holds true for dependency management as well. Depending on what you’re doing with Python—whether it’s building reusable libraries, writing web apps, or diving into data science and machine learning—your workflow can look completely different from someone else’s. That being said, my usual approach to any development process is to pick a method and give it a shot to see if it works for my specific needs. Once a process works, I usually automate it and rarely revisit it unless something breaks. ...

I was watching this amazing lightning talk1 by Karla Burnett and wanted to understand how traceroute works in Unix. Traceroute is a tool that shows the route of a network packet from your computer to another computer on the internet. It also tells you how long it takes for the packet to reach each stop along the way. It’s useful when you want to know more about how your computer connects to other computers on the internet. For example, if you want to visit a website, your computer sends a request to the website’s server, which is another computer that hosts the website. But the request doesn’t go directly from your computer to the server. It has to pass through several other devices, such as routers, that help direct the traffic on the internet. These devices are called hops. Traceroute shows you the list of hops that your request goes through, and how long it takes for each hop to respond. This can help you troubleshoot network problems, such as slow connections or unreachable websites. ...

Recently, I purchased a domain for this blog and migrated the content from rednafi.github.io1 to rednafi.com2. This turned out to be a much bigger hassle than I originally thought it’d be, mostly because, despite setting redirection for almost all the URLs from the previous domain to the new one and submitting the new sitemap.xml3 to the Search Console, Google kept indexing the older domain. To make things worse, the search engine selected the previous domain as canonical, and no amount of manual requests were changing the status in the last 30 days. Strangely, I didn’t encounter this issue with Bing, as it reindexed the new site within a week after I submitted the sitemap file via their webmaster panel. ...

Cloudflare absolutely nailed the serverless function DX with Cloudflare Workers1. However, I feel like it’s yet to receive widespread popularity like AWS Lambda since as of now, the service only offers a single runtime—JavaScript. But if you can look past that big folly, it’s a delightful piece of tech to work with. I’ve been building small tools with it for a couple of years but never got around to writing about the immense productivity boost it usually gives me whenever I need to quickly build and deploy a self-contained service. ...

This weekend, I was working on a fun project that required a fixed-time job scheduler to run a curl command at a future timestamp. I was aiming to find the simplest solution that could just get the job done. I’ve also been exploring Google Bard1 recently and wanted to see how it stacks up against other LLM tools like ChatGPT, BingChat, or Anthropic’s Claude in terms of resolving programming queries. ...

I needed a way to sort a Django queryset based on a custom sequence of an attribute. Typically, Django allows sorting a queryset by any attribute on the model or related to it in either ascending or descending order. However, what if you need to sort the queryset following a custom sequence of attribute values? Suppose, you’re working with a model called Product where you want to sort the rows of the table based on a list of product ids that are already sorted in a particular order. Here’s how it might look: ...

I recently gave my blog1 a fresh new look and decided it was time to spruce up my GitHub profile’s2 landing page as well. GitHub has a special3 way of treating the README.md file of your repo, displaying its content as the landing page for your profile. My goal was to showcase a brief introduction about myself and my work, along with a list of the five most recent articles on my blog. Additionally, I wanted to ensure that the article list stayed up to date. ...

One of my favorite pastimes these days is to set BingChat to creative mode, ask it to teach me a trick about topic X, and then write a short blog post about it to reinforce my understanding. Some of the things it comes up with are absolutely delightful. In the spirit of that, I asked it to teach me a Shell trick that I can use to mimic maps or dictionaries in a shell environment. I didn’t even know what I was expecting. ...

Whenever I need to deduplicate the items of an iterable in Python, my usual approach is to create a set from the iterable and then convert it back into a list or tuple. However, this approach doesn’t preserve the original order of the items, which can be a problem if you need to keep the order unscathed. Here’s a naive approach that works: from __future__ import annotations from collections.abc import Iterable # Python >3.9 def dedup(it: Iterable) -> list: seen = set() result = [] for item in it: if item not in seen: seen.add(item) result.append(item) return result it = (2, 1, 3, 4, 66, 0, 1, 1, 1) deduped_it = dedup(it) # Gives you [2, 1, 3, 4, 66, 0] This code snippet defines a function dedup that takes an iterable it as input and returns a new list containing the unique items of the input iterable in their original order. The function uses a set seen to keep track of the items that have already been seen, and a list result to store the unique items. ...

I needed to compare two large directories with thousands of similarly named PDF files and find the differing filenames between them. In the first pass, this is what I did: Listed out the content of the first directory and saved it in a file: ls dir1 > dir1.txt Did the same for the second directory: ls dir2 > dir2.txt Compared the difference between the two outputs: diff dir1.txt dir2.txt This returned the name of the differing files likes this: ...

Whenever I need to whip up a quick command line tool, my go-to is usually Python. Python’s CLI solutions tend to be more robust than their Shell counterparts. However, dealing with its portability can sometimes be a hassle, especially when all you want is to distribute a simple script. That’s why while toying around with argparse to create a dynamic menu, I decided to ask ChatGPT if there’s a way to achieve the same using native shell scripting. Delightfully, it introduced me to the dead-simple select command that I probably should’ve known about years ago. But I guess better late than never! Here’s what I was trying to accomplish: ...

When writing shell scripts, I’d often resort to using hardcoded ANSI escape codes1 to format text, such as: #!/usr/bin/env bash BOLD="\033[1m" UNBOLD="\033[22m" FG_RED="\033[31m" BG_YELLOW="\033[43m" BG_BLUE="\033[44m" RESET="\033[0m" # Print a message in bold red text on a yellow background. echo -e "${BOLD}${FG_RED}${BG_YELLOW}This is a warning message${RESET}" # Print a message in white text on a blue background. echo -e "${BG_BLUE}This is a debug message${RESET}" This shell snippet above shows how to add text formatting and color to shell script output via ANSI escape codes. It defines a few variables that contain different escape codes for bold, unbold, foreground, and background colors. Then, we echo two log messages with different colors and formatting options. ...

Whenever I plan to build something, I spend 90% of my time researching and figuring out the idiosyncrasies of the tools that I decide to use for the project. LLM tools like ChatGPT has helped me immensely in that regard. I’m taking on more tangential side projects because they’re no longer as time-consuming as they used to be and provide me with an immense amount of joy and learning opportunities. While LLM interfaces like ChatGPT may hallucinate, confabulate, and confidently give you misleading information, they also allow you to avoid starting from scratch when you decide to work on something. Personally, this benefits me enough to keep language models in my tool belt and use them to churn out more exploratory work at a much faster pace. ...