My blog| BackSlasher
When adding a linter to an existing codbase, my methodology is as follows: Create lint config files and approve them with the team (people have strong opinions about tab widths), add them to the repo Run the linter a single time over the entire codebase, autofixing what it can, and adding comments to ignore what it can’t. Add some pre-commit / pre-merge rule to run the linter and preventing new violations being added Grepping the ignore comments we added in #2, fixing their violations caref...| BackSlasher
I’m currently on vacation abroad and need access to one of the government-run websites to coordinate a time-sensitive matter. As a very cheap security measure, said government website doesn’t work if accessed from a foreign VPN. A courteous explanation would be that the attack/usage ratio from abroad is much higher. A less favorable one would be that they’re just lazy.| BackSlasher
I used to be one of those people running a rpi home server. I have a long history with running rpi, and I learned some things along the way: The disasterous effects of undervoltage on attached harddrives (goodbye data integrity, hello fsck on boot) The difficulty of running an OS from an SDcard (system upgrades take as long to write to disk as they do to download the packages) The oddities of not having a proper system clock when starting up (tls certs are “not yet valid” because we’re ...| BackSlasher
I was asked to create an endpoint that gets an SQL query and replies with a JSON list of the results. The prototype was ready in 10 minutes:| BackSlasher
I got around to troubleshooting a Python process running in Docker that had some permission problems accessing Google Storage Reproing inside Python with google-cloud-storage was a bit bothersome, and installing the gcloud cli on an Ubuntu-based Docker image takes too much effort on an ephemeral container (if I change stuff, I need to create a new container and I’ll have to reinstall it all over again). I was looking for something that is both easy to run, and doesn’t require me to modify...| BackSlasher
I recently got to work on prototyping a small Django-based website that was somewhat like a message board. One of the features requested was allowing users to upload a profile picture, which necessitated storing said pictures somewhere. Django is very opinionated about storing such files in a filesystem, but I prefer storing them in a DB. Here are my reasons:| BackSlasher
A team I work with is very happy with the k8s / ArgoCD setup we set up, and now wants to manage their experimental ML workloads in k8s as well. These workloads run in Lambda Labs, who we use to quickly set up a few GPU-enabled Ubuntu machines in varying sizes. Those servers are not part of a managed k8s cluster, but instead you’re given SSH and Jupyter access and expected to deploy your workload yourself.| BackSlasher
I recently ran into a friend that wanted some help with an app. Because the app is in super secret stealth mode, let’s pretend instead it’s “Pizza Advisor” - an app that uses top of the line Machine Learning to help you plan a great pizza.| BackSlasher
You’re an app developer now Let’s say you’re working on an app. The app helps you search for e-mail messages that relate to a certain topic. This works well enough. As a nifty extra, you added a small pixelated image of the search topic, that is generated on-demand using some ML model. For instance, when searching for a dog, you’d get a dog image.| BackSlasher
One of my projects involves communicating over SMS with cellular-connected IoT devices. The company already has a working infastructure for sending and recieving SMS with Twilio, which worked well for most of the time. The API was convenient (HTTP to send, HTTP webhooks to recieve), pricing was reasonable, and reliability was OK. However, there was a small problem.| BackSlasher
