infrastructure

Programming a blog you'll learn this (pirobits v3)

8/20/2024·5 min

I’ve always enjoyed using my blog as a side project to experiment with different technologies, explore ideas, and share my learnings as I build products and tools as a software engineer. Now, it’s time to roll out a new version.

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Two Sum, solving a programming challenge

8/12/2024·5 min

Solving programming challenges is something I'm passionate about: on one hand, it requires understanding the basics of programming, having a deep knowledge of how computers work, knowing about complexity orders and the "Big O" notation, and on the other hand, having some ingenuity and creativity.

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🔐 Manage your .env files securely (local secrets and credentials)

8/5/2024·4 min

I have been using and testing different AI programming assistants for a while now, and I love them. The only thing that concerns me is that misconfiguration could lead to credentials being sent over the network.

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Extracting the Color Palette from an Image in Rust (color quantization)

7/29/2024·5 min

Working with images has always seemed like a fascinating topic to me for several reasons: it's visual, it's an optimization challenge, you work with matrices... Specifically, I was drawn to an algorithm to summarize the colors of an image and extract the most important ones: color quantization using an octree.

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Run TypeScript code with TSX (TS-NODE alternative)

7/22/2024·3 min

Node is one of the most practical runtimes available today, and I often use it for certain tasks (alongside Python or Go for others). In general, I enjoy working with TypeScript because having a type system helps me structure the code better, in addition to helping you see where changes impact.

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Deploying from Local to Production. You Don't Need CI/CD

7/15/2024·4 min

There are different work environments (development, staging, production) with automatic deployment processes (CI/CD) on platforms like GitLab or GitHub. But do you really need all this?

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Kubernetes or VPS: Which is better? My experience.

7/8/2024·6 min

After several years of working with Kubernetes, I sometimes wonder if it is better to work with virtual machines instead. In this article, I'll share my experience and the advantages and disadvantages of each option.

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Learn Apache Kafka: Basic Concepts

6/3/2024·5 min

This week I've been working with Kafka, and since it's new to me, I want to deep study the most important concepts and share these fundamental ideas with you. It's important to note that although I’m sharing key ideas here, to learn how to use Kafka, I recommend two things: first, create a test environment to understand and reinforce your knowledge, and second, deepen some concepts by reading books.

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Serverless vs K8S vs VPS: Which is the Best Option to Deploy Your Project?

5/27/2024·4 min

Deploying a project may seem complicated, but it's actually the easiest and most fun part. Professionally, I manage infrastructure, so I want to show you what options exist and why choosing a VPS is the best.

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Tutorial: Google Sheets as a Database with Node.js

5/20/2024·5 min

When you want to build an IT product, often you need a storage layer. The most common approach is to resort to SQL or NoSQL relational databases. But, are there other alternatives?

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Developing an LRUCache in Go with Github

data structures

5/13/2024·5 min

In the last post I talked about my experience testing Copilot for a week. In this one we are going to implement a data structure, an LRUCache, using AI assistants to see how it works.

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My experience using GitHub Copilot one week as a Software Engineer

5/11/2024·3 min

These past months I have been using ChatGPT in my day to day as a software engineer but, what about tools like GitHub Copilot? This week I've been testing it to tell you about my experience developing with an AI assistant.

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Install Ubuntu Server on your Raspberry Pi

5/5/2024·7 min

Learn how to install and configure Ubuntu Server on your Raspberry Pi to build a homelab, deploy your projects or just learn. I tell you everything you need and a step by step.

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Seeking focus in a world full of distractions

5/1/2024·3 min

As there are more and more distractions, as well as so many things to do, I am starting to use different techniques to have more focus and progress on my goals. One of the tools that helps me the most is the pomodoro, as it is very easy to get distracted or procrastinate instead of doing your homework.

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Message queue using MySQL: SELECT * FOR UPDATE

4/29/2024·6 min

Writing a queuing system does not have to involve using complex software or writing hundreds of lines of code. In this post I want to explain how using a simple MySQL table and a terminal you can make a queuing system, which you can then implement in any language.

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Phi3 vs Llama3: the new generation LLMs

4/26/2024·3 min

The new language models such as Phi3 for me are a revolution because being much smaller has several advantages: they are faster, therefore cheaper, and you can run them on virtually any platform.

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MySQL: ENUM Datatype

4/24/2024·1 min

Today I discovered that MySQL has a data type which is an ENUM. It allows you to define up to 2^16 or 65536 different values. The peculiarity is that you can define a set of values such as “status” => “pending”, “wip”, “done”, and MySQL itself converts them into values 1, 2, 3... Important: the values start at 1 and not 0. Note that it can have either a DEFAULT value or it can be NULL and in this case, if it is not defined, the field value will be NULL.

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How to make presentations with Reveal.js (HTML, JS and CSS)

4/22/2024·4 min

Looking for the best tool to create presentations, I'll tell you why I chose Reveal.js over other tools like PowerPoint.

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My working setup: adding acoustic treatment

4/16/2024·3 min

One of the things I have always done is to progressively improve my setup. In the last few months I have improved the quality with which I record videos: both image and sound. And don't think that you need a lot of money for this: my equipment for recording videos is very cheap and I'm happy with the result.

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Solving Sudokus with backtracking in Python

4/15/2024·5 min

Sudokus is something that has always caught my attention and, when I learnt about backtracking during my degree in computer engineering, in the artificial intelligence subjects, I came up with the idea of solving sudokus using this method.

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