Newvick's blog

Intro When you want fast lookups in a sorted collection, a very common choice is a B-tree.

Recently found this summarization prompt that worked quite well.

I gave a presentation at $work about data modelling based on William Kent's Data and Reality (read the 2nd edition, not the third).

How effective are LLMs as tutors?

When building a service that handles many different API integrations, it's helpful to standardize the response.

(Note: This post is part of the simpledb series) Intro Accessing data from disk is dramatically slower than from RAM - by a factor of 100,000.

Intro I recently needed to learn Python concurrency.

Every time you query a database, a complex series of actions begin behind the scenes.

Have you implemented a simple RAG system but found it a bit lacking?

I was recently developing a RAG (retrieval augmented generation) app, using vector search via embeddings generated from OpenAI and pgvector.

As a fellow grug brained developer, I also agree that complexity is very bad.

I've been working my way through Andrej Karpathy's spelled-out intro to backpropagation, and this post is my recap of how backpropagation works.

I was recently working on a bug that only appeared on production.

Stable diffusion allows non-artistic individuals, like myself, to create stunning images simply by providing a text prompt.

Why are B-trees important?

Do you need to group together similar data points into sets?

Tables with polymorphic associations can be quite annoying to query with sql.

Performance concerns are usually put off until they become issues.