Blog

My thoughts on technology, business, and adjacent topics.

Artificial Intelligence (15)
AWS (13)
Databases (8)
DevOps (12)
Developer Experience (17)
GraphQL (14)

How to write robust webhook handlers

Webhooks are surprisingly hard to process correctly. Almost every software project I’ve wo…

Lean in to the graph when writing resolvers

Designing great resolver functions in GraphQL is quite unintuitive. Giving consumers the a…

Don’t use TypeScript’s string enums

I’ve written about TypeScript enums in the past, and back then I encouraged the use of enu…

It takes a village

I typically describe my career as being the result of a lot of luck. There are so many key…

You just can’t be Googling ‘Select’

I’ve been extremely fortunate over the course of my career, and I’ve been able to learn fr…

Low and steady write rates can be misleading

A common mistake in system design interviews is to underestimate a low but steady write ra…

Leveraging logprobs to build better generative AI systems

Autofilling form fields has become an increasingly common and practical application of gen…

GraphQL collection lookups

One of the powerful design patterns that can be employed within a GraphQL schema is the co…

Using the Sunset header with GraphQL

Try as we might to design APIs that last, it is very difficult to completely avoid the nee…

Deploy Metabase on AWS App Runner

I’m working on a side project with a friend, and we needed to quickly spin up a BI tool to…

A deep dive into OpenAI’s Structured Outputs

OpenAI released Structured Outputs today, alongside a new version of gpt-4o and gpt-4o-min…

I went on a podcast

A couple of months back I recorded a podcast episode with the folks over at Core to Cloud.…

Custom error codes in tRPC

tRPC has a fairly comprehensive set of built-in error codes, but because they’re baked in …

New LLMs aren’t always better

LLMs have come a very long way over the past couple of years. When I started running the A…

Review your own PRs

We all know that maintaining clean and efficient code is paramount to system quality, but …

Bulletproof GraphQL polling

At Crimson one of the first projects undertaken by my AI team was to produce high-quality …

Conventional changelogs suck

″Conventional commits” are a (pseudo)standard for authoring Git commit messages. Following…

Be a tidy kiwi

The natural environment has huge importance in New Zealand. Coming in from an internationa…

My take on GraphQL naming conventions

Design consistency is important, because it frees up developer brainpower for important wo…

Why you shouldn’t namespace GraphQL mutations

One of GraphQL’s limitations is that it has no native concept of namespaces. All types def…

How to track your SaaS’ carbon footprint on AWS

Software is becoming an increasingly large contributor to the world’s carbon emissions, an…

Always use a dataloader

Can you spot the hidden findMany query lurking inside this GraphQL schema?

Add a base to your multistage Docker build

Most people know that it’s possible to use multi-stage Docker builds to minimize final ima…

Why does GraphQL have separate input and output types?

There are a few languages out there which come with multiple “types” of object, but GraphQ…

Software reliability happens in depth

A major difference that delineates software from other engineering disciplines is the frag…

If you’re paying for AWS support, use it

A few years ago while working at Kwotimation I needed to build a search feature. We’d rece…

Nest, nest, nest

Aggressively nesting your GraphQL schema wherever possible is one of the best tools you ha…

Do you need an LLM for that?

LLMs are being used for everything these days, and it’s easy to see why. With relatively l…

How seriously do you take your SLOs?

The Google SRE book is one of the most important texts I have ever read. If you are workin…

Use `varchar`, not `text`

If you started your programming journey in the early 2010s like I did, then it’s likely th…

How to think about serverless pricing

The cloud business model is a simple one. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and smaller players l…

How to install private npm packages

If you’ve got an error which looks like the one below, this article will help you resolve …

Beware the architecture astronaut

The other day I posted about how to use pg_stat_statements to find slow PostgreSQL queries…

The OpenAI dashboard is a lesson in product management

On December 27, Crimson Education’s usage of GPT-4 doubled overnight and remained elevated…

Intentionally breaking types to guide scary refactors

At my last job we sold a quoting SaaS to tradespeople, and naturally a big component of ou…

Identifying slow PostgreSQL queries

At my job I’ve been working on identifying performance and stability issues with our main …

Is GPT-4 cost effective yet?

My general workflow with GPT is to first get a prototype working using GPT-4, and then to …

Making breaking GraphQL changes without breaking anything

We had an issue the other month with our internal summarization microservice, which necess…

Don’t rely too naively on GPT’s JSON mode

Shortly after OpenAI’s DevDay I wrote up a deep dive into the “JSON mode” which came bundl…

Don’t hire for next quarter

For the majority of companies it is a bad idea to hire software engineers for projects com…

Invoking GraphQL resolvers multiple times

Imagine that you’re building out a web page that allows students to view a list of their a…

Big GPT performance improvements

I’ve been digging into the announcements from OpenAI’s DevDay (here’s the deep dive on the…

Strategies for managing GPT-4 rate limits

The upper limit for GPT-4 rate limits have significantly improved over the past few months…

Is it time to stop requesting YAML from GPT?

The superpower of GPT and other LLMs is their ability to rapidly learn in-context off high…

OpenAI’s strange 502s

I’ve been leading the development of a new feature at Crimson Education that we just launc…

How to implement Global Object Identification

Global object identification is a GraphQL specification which describes the Node interface…

Efficient data retention policies

Last year Retool authored a post describing how they upgraded a 4 TB PostgreSQL database f…

Shadowing isn’t so bad

I introduced a bug the other month to CGA’s “Talk Time” Zoom app. This tool tracks the amo…

Centralized resource ID generation with Drizzle

I’m a huge fan of type-prefixed IDs because they make development so much more pleasant. O…

Managing your AWS organization in Terraform

Partitioning your cloud infrastructure across different AWS accounts is a best-practice th…

Avoid JSON file merge conflicts

I run into JSON file merge conflicts almost every day, and a shocking percentage of the ti…

Drizzle’s killer feature is TypeScript

I’ve been using Drizzle as my ORM for a new side project because it supports running insid…

Set up monitoring for unauthorized AWS API access

AWS CloudTrail is an indispensable tool for improving your security posture, but it’s sadl…

Tag your cloud resources with their repository

An effective tagging strategy is a must-have for organizations relying on the cloud. A cle…

Don’t put foreign keys in your GraphQL schema

GraphQL schema design is hard, and a lot of engineering teams end up making mistakes when …

Understanding “versions” and “staging labels” in Secrets Manager

On the surface AWS Secrets Manager is a straightforward service. You create secrets, store…

Using Terraform plan to write your IaC

Using infrastructure-as-code solutions such as Terraform is a great way to keep your cloud…

The missing piece for self-healing Elastic Beanstalk apps

At Crimson we use Elastic Beanstalk to run our Docker images, and we leverage an old inter…

Instantly save 10% on your RDS bill

AWS’ proprietary ARM-based Graviton chips have existed for many years now, but there are s…

How to verify environment variables are set in Next.js

The “Twelve-Factor App” methodology dictates that all app configuration is stored in envir…

Cool language features: JavaScript’s using statement

Everyone knows what a memory leak is, and the prevalence of this bug is a testament to the…

Be wary of bad Terraform defaults

Terraform and other infrastructure-as-code tools are incredibly powerful, but there are so…

Fixing React hydration errors with double-rendering

Moving from purely client rendered React apps to using server rendering is great for perfo…

Database-generated human resource IDs

I previously wrote about my preferred ID format consisting of a small type prefix and a KS…

Securing LLM-based products

A month ago OpenAI threatened legal action against gpt4free, a project which allows you to…

Alpine is slowing down your Python builds

At Crimson we have a brand new “chain service” which is responsible for executing LangChai…

GPT-4 rate limits are brutal; use GPT-3.5 instead

Something which doesn’t seem to be getting much attention is just how punishing the rate l…

How to purge your CDN from a pipeline

When you deploy a new frontend bundle it’s a good idea to purge your CDN to ensure you won…

GraphQL is for your product

There’s a big difference between building with GraphQL and older style REST endpoints: Gra…

Stop using `defaultProps`!

I’ve been writing web apps with React for a really long time now[^1], and I’ve seen a numb…

Speak slowly and buy a decent microphone

Today we’re bringing President Roosevelt’s foreign policy strategy into the modern era. Bi…

Object IDs for humans

IDs are an essential part of API design. So much of the code we write as engineers uses ID…

LLMs are just tools

I manage and run Crimson’s engineering all hands, a biweekly meeting where someone from th…

The brag sheet: your career advancement hack

One of the first things I talk about with new reports is the importance of starting and ma…

Cool language features: Swift guard statements

There are a lot of programming languages to choose from, and some of them boast incredibly…

pnpm is blazing fast: real world benchmarks

One of the major projects I’ve overseen while working at Crimson Education was a complete …

English’s stranglehold on NLP has been broken

I saw a Reddit post the other day where a number of folks in NLP shared how GPT is affecti…

Startups have to care about productivity again

When it’s raining money and a dollar today is worth about the same as a dollar seven years…

Questions for evaluating a new technology

At some point in your software career, someone on your team is going to suggest introducin…

What is the HTTP `Sunset` header?

Deprecating API endpoints has always been painful because there’s no ‘one true way’ to do …

How to use next/image with Remote MDX

As I’ve mentioned previously, I took a few shortcuts when I first built this website. Whil…

Code doesn’t explain itself. Write more.

There’s a golden rule to fostering a great engineering culture, and it is to aggressively …

The cost of bandwidth: What’s in a byte?

Green software engineering is an increasingly important topic as the world’s economy conti…

How to animate height based on content in React

I’ve been in situations where I need to smoothly animate the height of an HTML element mor…

CSS-in-JS to Tailwind: 36% better web vitals

The first version of this website was a slapdash effort to put something up while looking …

Metaverse and VR: No one cares

Mark Zuckerberg has sent out a “chilling” message to Meta’s staff, stating that the compan…

Advertising is for losers, building better products is for winners

You know what the inventor of the refrigerator probably did after finishing up the first p…

Apple and the value of small details

There is an absolutely fantastic Medium article from 2018 discussing the shape of the iPho…

Microfrontends? Scam!

Historically, backend development occurred in the form of giant monolithic blocks of code.…

Typescript enums: Why you should use string values

This is an old post and my views have changed. I don’t think you should use enums in TypeS…

The 14″ MacBook is the worst one

Apple Silicon’s release in 2020 shook up the industry in a big way. The M-series chips hav…

The three step guide to coding interviews

For a while now I’ve been running a girls’ competitive programming group, and one of the m…

The beauty of niche software

Building software is fun. It’s a remarkably unique intellectual challenge which totally gr…

Give us a contrast ratio media query!

I previously wrote about on the untimely demise of the CSS color-mod function, and the neg…

RIP CSS `color-mod` function

Something about applying colors in CSS feels awkward and out of place. While font sizes ca…

The Disney+ play button is unreliable

Disney+ is a fantastic service. Pound-for-pound it’s cheaper than Netflix while also deliv…

Apple should charge more for IAP

Purchasing goods online is a terrible user experience, because businesses at large have ma…

Vercel and Netlify: slick AF

When I was about 10 years old, I was introduced to HTML and GameMaker (version 7!) while a…

How to make beautiful inputs on the web (like Stripe and Xero)

Every piece of software takes user input in some capacity. Right now I’m typing this artic…

A year of helping tradies get online: My 2021

I started working at Kwotimation about October 2020, and as I write this article it’s curr…

Analysis of the NZ government’s proposed unemployment insurance scheme

This Wednesday the New Zealand government announced an unemployment insurance scheme which…

Alternative NZOI training site: Progress update

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of teaching C++ to a group of bright high school stude…

How to get macOS hotkeys working in iTerm

macOS has a bunch of great Emacs-derived keyboard shortcuts for editing text—⌃a, for insta…

NZOI Camp 2022 Retrospective

While the Olympics only occur every four years, there are a number of Olympiad competition…

The scrollwheel of Logitech’s MX Master 3 mouse is horrifically broken

The MX Master 3 mouse is a productivity mouse with universally positive reviews. They were…

How to access your Google Workplace’s postmaster@ inbox

In order to help debug some email deliverability issues at work, we wanted to sign up for …

The fundamental rule of negotiation: understand the other party

Anything and everything in this world is negotiable, and even if you don’t actively seek o…

NFT art will lead to something bigger

NFTs (“non-fungible tokens”) are all the rage this year. In case you missed it, NFTs work …

On the updated Philips Hue app

I have a lot of Philips Hue bulbs set up in my workspace as they look fantastic and there’…

The one change I’d make to software engineering courses

There’s a lot of content out there on the Internet discussing the shortcomings of software…

Performance on the web: What’s being said?

It is not an uncommon belief that software is in a state of decline, and it’s not too diff…

M1 MacBook: Impressions after two weeks

On 25 February I received my M1 MacBook Pro (there’s a pretty significant waiting time for…

Buy vs build: It’s not that complicated

It’s impossible to be responsible for every single line of code running inside your softwa…

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