Alex Woods

Rendering means different things in different contexts.

Unlike TypeScript, Go doesn't allow truthiness in conditional statements.

How to safely tighten validation in PostgreSQL.

Postgres domains let you define custom types based on existing types, but with validation constraints.

This article delves into two types of constraints in Postgres: unique and exclude.

PL/pgSQL functions can reuse types of columns in tables.

PL/pgSQL allows you to run dynamic commands with the `execute` keyword.

While the SQL standard specifies that multiple triggers should be fired in time-of-creation order, PostgreSQL uses name order.

There are a lot of ways to insert data into a Postgres database, including inserting with values, inserting with select, upserting, and copying data from a file.

Postgres has row-level and statement-level triggers.

This article highlights the use of triggers in Postgres, and how certain performance issues can arise.

wc is a command-line tool for counting characters, bytes, lines, and words in a file or from standard input.

Buffered channels in Go can simulate semaphores for worker pools.

As a coding challenge, I built a chat server.

I've been on a journery to understand more deeply git's internals.

Rust macros like `println!

At work, we generate types from GraphQL using TypeScript for a better development experience.

Structural typing, seen in TypeScript, allows type compatibility based on structure.

In the past few months, I've had one of the most interesting challenges of my engineering career.

Cloud KMS is a tool provided by GCP that can help for storing sensitive data like passwords or API keys.

In an inverted binary tree, each node is swapped with its corresponding node on the opposite side, akin to rotating the tree around its center axis.

ls -lh shows the disk space used for directory metadata, not the actual file sizes within directories.

If you go to the browser, and type in a domain name, what happens next?

Since I have far more experience with Kubernetes, I wanted to explore what running containers would look like on AWS, especially not using EKS.

At my last job, we had an outage of our ingress controller, Kong.

If you merged a PR and you want to undo it, you can revert the merge commit - given you use merge commits.

To reverse a linked list in O(n) time complexity and O(1) space complexity, you need to carefully manage the pointers.

This article provides a comprehensive guide to using kubectl for managing Kubernetes resources.

The article explains the basic concept of VPNs, highlighting their ability to provide access to private networks and hide locations through encryption and encapsulation.

Here we discuss running an Envoy plugin within an Istio sidecar.

Pulumi and Terraform are the two leading Infrastructure as Code tools.

The root cause analysis of Slack's January 4th, 2021 outage highlights the complexity of resolving such incidents, often involving multiple interrelated issues rather than a single root cause.

At work, we encountered socket hang up issues after implementing connection pooling between two microservices, A and B.

Consistent hashing ensures even traffic distribution in load balancing.

A service mesh, such as Istio, enhances observability, security, and traffic management in a K8s cluster.

Kustomize offers an alternative to templating for managing Kubernetes manifests by using overlays to create variants of base configurations.

Studying for the GCP Architect exam revealed the complexities of Cloud Bigtable, a NoSQL wide column store database, originally detailed in Google's Bigtable paper.

Joining in Kafka Streams is complex due to the involvement of time and the need for proper key and partition alignment.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about best practices of evolving schemas in with Kafka, something that is often overlooked—this article is the result of all of that.

This article explores how an Avro-formatted message is transformed from binary data in a Kafka topic to a strongly typed object in a consumer application.

This post goes over a git alias I use almost every day.

For newcomers to Kotlin, the scope functions can be hard to wrap your head around.

Inline functions are a powerful feature in Kotlin.

This article goes over the Reverse Integer problem on LeetCode.

Change data capture (CDC) is a method that makes data changes available across a system, which is especially useful in microservices architectures to avoid direct database sharing.

Data classes are a well-known feature in Kotlin.

Apache Kafka is one of the most groundbreaking technologies we software developers get to work with these days.

This article goes over the Longest Substring problem on LeetCode.

The article provides an introduction to lambda functions in Kotlin, highlighting their benefits and syntax.