Redowan's Reflections

Archive

2026  18

April  3

Error translation in Go services
Dynamo: Amazon's highly available key-value store
Stacked log lines considered harmful

March  12

What's the ideal dispatch mechanism?
Background jobs and inherited file descriptors
Testing unary gRPC services in Go
Repositories, transactions, and unit of work in Go
How do you handle transactions with the repository pattern?
Is passing user ID through context an antipattern?
What belongs in Go's context values?
Do you need a repository layer on top of sqlc?
Wrapping a gRPC client in Go
In praise of the etcd codebase
Go errors: to wrap or not to wrap?
Mutate your locked state inside a closure

February  2

What canceled my Go context?
Structured concurrency & Go

January  1

Your Go tests probably don't need a mocking library

2025  27

December  1

Tap compare testing for service migration

November  3

Splintered failure modes in Go
Re-exec testing Go subprocesses
Revisiting interface segregation in Go

October  3

Avoiding collisions in Go context keys
Organizing Go tests
Subtest grouping in Go

September  3

Let the domain guide your application structure
Test state, not interactions
Early return and goroutine leak

August  2

Lifecycle management in Go tests
Gateway pattern for external service calls

June  1

Flags for discoverable test config in Go

May  1

You probably don't need a DI framework

April  3

Preventing accidental struct copies in Go
Go 1.24's "tool" directive
Capturing console output in Go tests

March  4

Deferred teardown closure in Go testing
Three flavors of sorting Go slices
Nil comparisons and Go interface
Stacked middleware vs embedded delegation in Go

February  2

Why does Go's io.Reader have such a weird signature?
Go slice gotchas

January  4

The domain knowledge dilemma
Hierarchical rate limiting with Redis sorted sets
Dynamic shell variables
Link blog in a static site

2024  40

December  4

Running only a single instance of a process
Function types and single-method interfaces in Go
SSH saga
Injecting Pytest fixtures without cluttering test signatures

November  2

Explicit method overriding with @typing.override
Quicker startup with module-level __getattr__

October  4

Docker mount revisited
Topological sort
Writing a circuit breaker in Go
Discovering direnv

September  5

Notes on building event-driven systems
Bash namerefs for dynamic variable referencing
Behind the blog
Shell redirection syntax soup
Shades of testing HTTP requests in Python

August  4

Taming parametrize with pytest.param
HTTP requests via /dev/tcp
Log context propagation in Python ASGI apps
Please don't hijack my Python root logger

July  3

The *nix install command
Here-doc headache
The sane pull request

June  1

I kind of like rebasing

May  1

Protobuffed contracts

April  2

TypeIs does what I thought TypeGuard would do in Python
ETag and HTTP caching

March  2

Crossing the CORS crossroad
Dysfunctional options pattern in Go

February  4

Einstellung effect
Strategy pattern in Go
Anemic stack traces in Go
Retry function in Go

January  8

Type assertion vs type switches in Go
Patching pydantic settings in pytest
Omitting dev dependencies in Go binaries
Eschewing black box API calls
Annotating args and kwargs in Python
Rate limiting via Nginx
Statically enforcing frozen data classes in Python
Planning palooza

2023  48

December  3

Reminiscing CGI scripts
Debugging dockerized Python apps in VSCode
Banish state-mutating methods from data classes

November  3

Finding flow amid chaos
The diminishing half-life of knowledge
Oh my poor business logic

October  2

Pesky little scripts
Footnotes for the win

September  4

Dotfile stewardship for the indolent
An ode to the neo-grotesque web
Self-hosted Google Fonts in Hugo
Configuring options in Go

August  7

Dummy load balancer in a single Go script
Limit goroutines with buffered channels
Writing a TOTP client in Go
Interface guards in Go
Writing on well-trodden topics
Go structured logging with slog
Notes on exit interviews

July  7

Taming conditionals with bitmasks
Using DNS record to share text data
Memory leakage in Python descriptors
Unix-style pipelining with Python's subprocess module
Enabling repeatable lazy iterations in Python
Descending into the aether
Escaping the template pattern hellscape in Python

June  2

Python dependency management redux
Implementing a simple traceroute clone in Python

May  7

Bulk request Google search indexing with API
Building a CORS proxy with Cloudflare Workers
Fixed-time job scheduling with UNIX 'at' command
Sorting a Django queryset by a custom sequence of an attribute
Periodic readme updates with GitHub Actions
Associative arrays in Bash
Deduplicating iterables while preserving order in Python

April  5

Process substitution in Bash
Dynamic menu with select statement in Bash
Simple terminal text formatting with tput
Building a web app to display CSV file stats with ChatGPT & Observable
Pushing real-time updates to clients with Server-Sent Events (SSEs)

March  1

Tinkering with Unix domain sockets

February  4

Signal handling in a multithreaded socket server
Switching between multiple data streams in a single thread
Skipping the first part of an iterable in Python
Pausing and resuming a socket server in Python

January  3

Debugging a containerized Django application in Jupyter Notebook
Manipulating text with query expressions in Django
Using tqdm with concurrent.fututes in Python

2022  61

December  1

Colon command in shell scripts

November  3

Faster bulk_update in Django
Installing Python on macOS with asdf
Save models with update_fields for better performance in Django

October  4

Python logging quirks in AWS Lambda environment
Dissecting an outage caused by eager-loading file content
Auditing commit messages on GitHub
To quote or not to quote

September  5

Returning values from a shell function
Verifying webhook origin via payload hash signing
Recipes from Python SQLite docs
Prefer urlsplit over urlparse to destructure URLs
Pick random values from an array in SQL(ite)

August  1

ExitStack in Python

July  7

Compose multiple levels of fixtures in pytest
Patch where the object is used
Partially assert callable arguments with 'unittest.mock.ANY'
When to use 'git pull --rebase'
Apply constraints with 'assert' in Python
Automerge Dependabot PRs on GitHub
Stream process a CSV file in Python

June  4

Bulk operations in Django with process pool
Read a CSV file from s3 without saving it to the disk
Distil git logs attached to a single file
Safer 'operator.itemgetter' in Python

May  1

Guard clause and exhaustiveness checking

April  3

Health check a server with 'nohup $(cmd) &'
Return JSON error payload instead of HTML text in DRF
Decoupling producers and consumers of iterables with generators in Python

March  11

Pre-allocated lists in Python
In favor of sentence case
Disallow large file download from URLs in Python
Declaratively transform data class fields in Python
Caching connection objects in Python
How not to run a script in Python
Mocking chained methods of datetime objects in Python
Declarative payloads with TypedDict in Python
Parametrized fixtures in pytest
Modify iterables while iterating in Python
Github action template for Python based projects

February  9

Self type in Python
Patching test dependencies via pytest fixture & unittest mock
Narrowing types with TypeGuard in Python
Why 'NoReturn' type exists in Python
Add extra attributes to enum members in Python
Peeking into the internals of Python's 'functools.wraps' decorator
Limit concurrency with semaphore in Python asyncio
Amphibian decorators in Python
Go Rusty with exception handling in Python

January  12

Variance of generic types in Python
Create a sub dictionary with O(K) complexity in Python
Gotchas of early-bound function argument defaults in Python
Use 'assertIs' to check literal booleans in Python unittest
Static typing Python decorators
Inspect docstrings with Pydoc
Check whether an integer is a power of two in Python
Uniform error response in Django Rest Framework
Difference between constrained 'TypeVar' and 'Union' in Python
Don't wrap instance methods with 'functools.lru_cache' decorator in Python
Cropping texts in Python with 'textwrap.shorten'
String interning in Python

2021  12

December  1

Structural subtyping in Python

November  11

Automatic attribute delegation in Python composition
Access 'classmethod's like 'property' methods in Python
Don't add extensions to shell executables
Use __init_subclass__ hook to validate subclasses in Python
Running tqdm with Python multiprocessing
Use daemon threads to test infinite while loops in Python
Use 'command -v' over 'which' to find a program's executable
Write git commit messages properly
Python's 'functools.partial' flattens nestings Automatically
Use curly braces while pasting shell commands
Use strict mode while running bash scripts

2020  12

July  2

Pedantic configuration management with Pydantic
Interfaces, mixins and building powerful custom data structures in Python

June  2

Deciphering Python's metaclasses
Implementing proxy pattern in Python

May  2

Effortless API response caching with Python & Redis
Untangling Python decorators

April  4

Effortless concurrency with Python's concurrent.futures
No really, Python's pathlib is great
Running Python linters with pre-commit hooks
Generic functions with Python's singledispatch

March  2

The curious case of Python's context manager
Reduce boilerplate code with Python's dataclasses

1970  2

January  2

2025
2024