I’m one of those people who will sit in front of a computer for hours, fiddling with algorithms or debugging performance issues, yet won’t spend 10 minutes to improve their workflows. While I usually get away with this, every now and then, my inertia slithers back to bite me. The latest episode was me realizing how tedious it is to move config files across multiple devices when I was configuring a new MacBook Air and Mac Mini at the same time....
This site1 is built with Hugo2 and served via GitHub pages3. Recently, I decided to change the font here to make things more consistent across different devices. However, I didn’t want to go with Google Fonts for a few reasons: CDN is another dependency. Hosting static assets on GitHub Pages has served me well. Google Fonts tracks users and violates4 GDPR in Germany. Google Analytics does that too. But since I’m using the latter anyway, this might come off a bit apocryphal....
I was curious to see if I could prototype a simple load balancer in a single Go script. Go’s standard library and goroutines make this trivial. Here’s what the script needs to do: Spin up two backend servers that’ll handle the incoming requests. Run a reverse proxy load balancer in the foreground. The load balancer will accept client connections and round-robin them to one of the backend servers; balancing the inbound load....
I was cobbling together a long-running Go script to send webhook messages to a system when some events occur. The initial script would continuously poll a Kafka topic for events and spawn new goroutines to make HTTP requests to the destination. This had two problems: It could create unlimited goroutines if many events arrived quickly It might overload the destination system by making many concurrent requests In Python, I’d use just asyncio....
A TOTP1 based 2FA system has two parts. One is a client that generates the TOTP code. The other part is a server. The server verifies the code. If the client and the server-generated codes match, the server allows the inbound user to access the target system. The code usually expires after 30 seconds and then, you’ll have to regenerate it to be able to authenticate. As per RFC-62382, the server shares a base-32 encoded secret key with the client....
I love Go’s implicit interfaces. While convenient, they can also introduce subtle bugs unless you’re careful. Types expected to conform to certain interfaces can fluidly add or remove methods. The compiler will only complain if an identifier anticipates an interface, but is passed a type that doesn’t implement that interface. This can be problematic if you need to export types that are required to implement specific interfaces as part of their API contract....
Before the release of version 1.21, you couldn’t set levels for your log messages in Go without either using third-party libraries or writing your own boilerplates. Coming from Python, I’ve always found this odd, considering that this capability has been in the Python standard library forever. However, it seems like the new log/slog subpackage in Go allows you to do that and a whole lot more. Apart from being able to add levels to log messages, slog also allows you to emit JSON-structured log messages and group them by certain attributes....
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....
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....
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....
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....
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....
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 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....
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....
I was working on a project where I needed to poll multiple data sources and consume the incoming data points in a single thread. In this particular case, the two data streams were coming from two different Redis lists. The correct way to consume them would be to write two separate consumers and spin them up as different processes. However, in this scenario, I needed a simple way to poll and consume data from one data source, wait for a bit, then poll and consume from another data source, and keep doing this indefinitely....
Consider this iterable: it = (1, 2, 3, 0, 4, 5, 6, 7) Let’s say you want to build another iterable that includes only the numbers that appear starting from the element 0. Usually, I’d do this: # This returns (0, 4, 5, 6, 7). from_zero = tuple( elem for idx, elem in enumerate(it) if idx >= it.index(0) ) While this is quite terse and does the job, it won’t work with a generator....
The colon : command is a shell utility that represents a truthy value. It can be thought of as an alias for the built-in true command. You can test it by opening a shell script and typing a colon on the command line, like this: : If you then inspect the exit code by typing $? on the command line, you’ll see a 0 there, which is exactly what you’d see if you had used the true command....
I’ve just migrated from Ubuntu to macOS for work and am still in the process of setting up the machine. I’ve been a lifelong Linux user and this is the first time I’ve picked up an OS that’s not just another flavor of Debian. Primarily, I work with Python, NodeJS, and a tiny bit of Go. Previously, any time I had to install these language runtimes, I’d execute a bespoke script that’d install:...