Week 3

It was largely a bug-fixing week. Not the best of the weeks.

What's brewing

Got a new coffee-making machine: Mukka Express
My brother and I are coffee addicts. Not the "black-coffee" kind, but the "instant coffee" ones who can't work without it.

We have been wanting to get a coffee machine for our office. I researched and came across Bialetti. Their Moka Pot is a traditional kitchen piece of Italy found in every house. But it makes only Espresso - a coffee without milk.

Bialetti also has a Mukka Express. Like Moka Pot, this too works with stove and …

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7th May 2022

Weekly Notes - 2

This was a little hobby-works week. I got to play on some new toy projects.

Major Developments

Created a custom Django starter template.
Deploying and setting up a new Django project takes 3-4 days. Most of the time I am copying my setup and deployment scripts from other projects. This starter template reduces the setup time to 10 minutes.
It mainly splits up the setting and requirements files for different environments, sets-up pre-commit hooks, has a deployment script for Uberspace and set-ups 12-factor authentication (using Django-environ).

Started another toy project: get-things-done.com.
Last week I started reading David Allen's …

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30th April 2022

Weekly Notes

I love to read weekly notes of some of my favourite techies:
- Simon Willison
- Chir.ag
- Monica
- Dejal

It is a wonderful insight into their lives. We get a sneak preview of the things they are working on and how they are thinking.

I too hope to publish updates that often. Kind of an open life journal. Not because I have too many interesting things to share. But because I want to get back to writing.

I love blogging. But it is hard to think of a new topic each time. It also takes a lot of …

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24th Jan. 2022

Extending full-text search in MySQL

We recently added a full-text search feature in Screener. It searches for all the exchange announcements. We initially faced a few issues while implementing it. However, we were easily able to find a way around them by creating a simple query parser.

The problems
MySQL offers 2 main types of searches. BOOLEAN and NATURAL MODE. The natural mode is a user-friendly mode. It takes the input and searches it across the database. The users don't need to learn anything new.

On the downside, the NATURAL mode doesn't allow much customisation. We cannot use "OR" in queries. It also doesn't search …

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24th Dec. 2021

Schlep Blindness

I loved this essay by PG. He explains the concept of "schlep blindness". It explains the reason why no one solved payments before Stripe. Every coder knew that problem. Every coder wanted a solution. Yet no one solved it! Because everyone thought that it was a hard problem. It will involve making deals with banks. And then take a lot of risks because of the flow of money involved. These are "schleps" that hackers like to avoid. But there is a fallacy here. ALL businesses involve schleps:

But I soon learned from experience that schleps are not merely inevitable, but …

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24th Dec. 2021

Using 2 lines of CSS for implementing tabs

This is such a cool CSS trick. Cross-browser. No JS.

The tabs are implemented as different sections with different ids. Then the tab contents are hidden using:

section { display: none; }

The CSS which toggles them is:

section:target { display: block; }

Noice!

12th Dec. 2021

Fixing MySQL disk-space

We saw a sudden increase in disk usage last month.

We store all persistent data on /data-volume. I checked what is using the space using:

sudo du -h --max-depth 1 /data-volume | sort -h

It showed MySQL folder was using around 150 GB. It was huge. Last week it was ~120 GB.

I was very concerned about this increase and dug more into it. I thought it was because of the full-text search index. But I wanted to be sure.

I was searching for a way to get stats around what is using space inside MySQL. Interestingly, the easiest …

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