My thoughts on technology, business, and adjacent topics.
I’ve been digging into the announcements from OpenAI’s DevDay (here’s the deep dive on the…
The upper limit for GPT-4 rate limits have significantly improved over the past few months…
The superpower of GPT and other LLMs is their ability to rapidly learn in-context off high…
I’ve been leading the development of a new feature at Crimson Education that we just launc…
Global object identification is a GraphQL specification which describes the Node interface…
Node
Last year Retool authored a post describing how they upgraded a 4 TB PostgreSQL database f…
I introduced a bug the other month to CGA’s “Talk Time” Zoom app. This tool tracks the amo…
I’m a huge fan of type-prefixed IDs because they make development so much more pleasant. O…
Partitioning your cloud infrastructure across different AWS accounts is a best-practice th…
I run into JSON file merge conflicts almost every day, and a shocking percentage of the ti…
I’ve been using Drizzle as my ORM for a new side project because it supports running insid…
AWS CloudTrail is an indispensable tool for improving your security posture, but it’s sadl…
An effective tagging strategy is a must-have for organizations relying on the cloud. A cle…
GraphQL schema design is hard, and a lot of engineering teams end up making mistakes when …
On the surface AWS Secrets Manager is a straightforward service. You create secrets, store…
Using infrastructure-as-code solutions such as Terraform is a great way to keep your cloud…
At Crimson we use Elastic Beanstalk to run our Docker images, and we leverage an old inter…
AWS’ proprietary ARM-based Graviton chips have existed for many years now, but there are s…
The “Twelve-Factor App” methodology dictates that all app configuration is stored in envir…
Everyone knows what a memory leak is, and the prevalence of this bug is a testament to the…
Terraform and other infrastructure-as-code tools are incredibly powerful, but there are so…
Moving from purely client rendered React apps to using server rendering is great for perfo…
I previously wrote about my preferred ID format consisting of a small type prefix and a KS…
A month ago OpenAI threatened legal action against gpt4free, a project which allows you to…
At Crimson we have a brand new “chain service” which is responsible for executing LangChai…
Something which doesn’t seem to be getting much attention is just how punishing the rate l…
When you deploy a new frontend bundle it’s a good idea to purge your CDN to ensure you won…
There’s a big difference between building with GraphQL and older style REST endpoints: Gra…
I’ve been writing web apps with React for a really long time now[^1], and I’ve seen a numb…
Today we’re bringing President Roosevelt’s foreign policy strategy into the modern era. Bi…
IDs are an essential part of API design. So much of the code we write as engineers uses ID…
I manage and run Crimson’s engineering all hands, a biweekly meeting where someone from th…
One of the first things I talk about with new reports is the importance of starting and ma…
There are a lot of programming languages to choose from, and some of them boast incredibly…
One of the major projects I’ve overseen while working at Crimson Education was a complete …
I saw a Reddit post the other day where a number of folks in NLP shared how GPT is affecti…
When it’s raining money and a dollar today is worth about the same as a dollar seven years…
At some point in your software career, someone on your team is going to suggest introducin…
Deprecating API endpoints has always been painful because there’s no ‘one true way’ to do …
As I’ve mentioned previously, I took a few shortcuts when I first built this website. Whil…
There’s a golden rule to fostering a great engineering culture, and it is to aggressively …
Green software engineering is an increasingly important topic as the world’s economy conti…
I’ve been in situations where I need to smoothly animate the height of an HTML element mor…
The first version of this website was a slapdash effort to put something up while looking …
Mark Zuckerberg has sent out a “chilling” message to Meta’s staff, stating that the compan…
You know what the inventor of the refrigerator probably did after finishing up the first p…
There is an absolutely fantastic Medium article from 2018 discussing the shape of the iPho…
Historically, backend development occurred in the form of giant monolithic blocks of code.…
Enumerations are found in almost every programming language there is. They’re a language f…
Apple Silicon’s release in 2020 shook up the industry in a big way. The M-series chips hav…
For a while now I’ve been running a girls’ competitive programming group, and one of the m…
Building software is fun. It’s a remarkably unique intellectual challenge which totally gr…
I previously wrote about on the untimely demise of the CSS color-mod function, and the neg…
color-mod
Something about applying colors in CSS feels awkward and out of place. While font sizes ca…
Disney+ is a fantastic service. Pound-for-pound it’s cheaper than Netflix while also deliv…
Purchasing goods online is a terrible user experience, because businesses at large have ma…
When I was about 10 years old, I was introduced to HTML and GameMaker (version 7!) while a…
Every piece of software takes user input in some capacity. Right now I’m typing this artic…
I started working at Kwotimation about October 2020, and as I write this article it’s curr…
This Wednesday the New Zealand government announced an unemployment insurance scheme which…
A few weeks ago I had the privilege of teaching C++ to a group of bright high school stude…
macOS has a bunch of great Emacs-derived keyboard shortcuts for editing text—⌃a, for insta…
⌃a
While the Olympics only occur every four years, there are a number of Olympiad competition…
The MX Master 3 mouse is a productivity mouse with universally positive reviews. They were…
In order to help debug some email deliverability issues at work, we wanted to sign up for …
Anything and everything in this world is negotiable, and even if you don’t actively seek o…
NFTs (“non-fungible tokens”) are all the rage this year. In case you missed it, NFTs work …
I have a lot of Philips Hue bulbs set up in my workspace as they look fantastic and there’…
There’s a lot of content out there on the Internet discussing the shortcomings of software…
It is not an uncommon belief that software is in a state of decline, and it’s not too diff…
On 25 February I received my M1 MacBook Pro (there’s a pretty significant waiting time for…
It’s impossible to be responsible for every single line of code running inside your softwa…