Shalvah's Blog

Background In a previous post, I wrote about building a presence sensor to automatically turn my bedroom lights on and off (smart bulbs connected to ...

Integrating with external services is a pain.

Everything is fucked, no systems are sound, all decisions are wrong, and we should destroy all software.

Context At a previous job, we built a service we called our operations platform.

Background I got these Antela smart bulbs a while ago.

I noticed a pattern when I join a new company.

I've finally completed the first year (of three) of my Bachelor's degree in Engineering at IU Hochschule.

As practice in thinking and talking about practical software design approaches (at the high and low level), I want to explore some scenarios from fir...

With the AI hype going around, you may have come across the phrase "vector search", "vector database", or "embeddings" lately.

Watching Dawn of the Planet of the Apes gave me some thoughts about dictatorship, and more broadly, leadership.

How SVG works The common way of representing digital images is via pixels.

We have the low-level tools for connecting to the Faktory server, executing commands, fetching data, logging, and so on.

This is a dump of my learnings and experiments while going down a little rabbit hole.

Let's talk about cardinality.

Goal: A brief exploration of what it means to "pack" and "unpack" bytes.

In this part, we'll focus on supporting some more parts of the Faktory protocol.

Separating responsibilities Following on from Part 3, it's time for some refactoring.

At this point, I'll take a break from Faktory-focused functionality to address the shortcomings I raised at the end of the last part.

This is a re-post of an article I wrote for my company's blog.

I want to share a little algorithm I wrote to solve a puzzle.

Now I'll turn what I did in Part 1 into code.

My recent queue foray put me on the scent of Faktory, a language-agnostic queue server made by Sidekiq's author.

No big revelation here, just writing this as a reminder to myself next time I try curl localhost from WSL and it doesn't work: Don't use localhost o...

This post is part 4 of a series where I build a task queue system.