- Je suis Charlie
-
On January 7th, 2015, terrorists killed journalists in France over caricatures. It was shocking at the time, and it’s still shocking today. I remember. So should we all.
- Guards and Pattern Guards
-
A short video explaining what are guards in general and how to use them in Kotlin 2.1.
- Databases in 2024: A Year in Review
-
- License changes
- Databricks vs. Snowflake
- DuckDB
- Random
- Larry Ellison trivia
- Announcing axum 0.8.0
-
I like axum, I use axum, but I wish they’d start releasing a 1.x version. Here, the minor 0.8 contains a breaking change.
- URL Pattern - Living Standard
-
Another specification from the WHATWG that escaped me. And it’s very detailed!
- Are these small LLMs really useful?
-
For this first article of 2025, I’ll keep it short and answer a question I’m often asked: "Are these small LLMs really useful?"
The short answer is yes, of course.
And I’ll give you some examples of my personal use of these "tiny" models.
- Résolution 2025: utiliser en permanence un assistant IA
-
Le signe d’un bon ingénieur: faire évoluer ses pratiques en fonction du contexte.
- Rules for Writing Software Tutorials
-
- Write for beginners
- Promise a clear outcome in the title
- Explain the goal in the introduction
- Show the end result
- Make code snippets copy/pasteable
- Use long versions of command-line flags
- Separate user-defined values from reusable logic
- Spare the reader from mindless tasks
- Let computers evaluate conditional logic
- Keep your code in a working state
- Boil it down to the essentials
- Don’t try to look pretty
- Minimize dependencies
- Specify filenames clearly
- Use consistent, descriptive headings
- Demonstrate that your solution works
- Link to a complete example
- The Joy of Under-Engineering
-
The post invites readers to write an app without any of the bells and whistles of the current technological landscape.
- You get a chance to understand the primitives, the basic building blocks that hide beneath all the tools you use daily.
- You start to appreciate the convenience that modern tooling truly offers.
- Equally, you’ll discover that basic building blocks are often good enough and get you further than you expected.
- You might learn that there are hardly any best practices in software development, only trade-offs that depend on circumstances.
- You get an opportunity to replace complicated parts in your developer toolbox with simpler alternatives.
- And of course you get the bragging rights of having shipped something in a completely unconventional way.
- Postgres UUIDv7 + per-backend monotonicity
-
An implementation for UUIDv7 was committed to Postgres earlier this month. These have all the benefits of a v4 (random) UUID, but are generated with a more deterministic order using the current time, and perform considerably better on inserts using ordered structures like B-trees.
- Docker on MacOS is still slow?
-
The post compares benchmarks performance across several containerization tools with different settings (e.g., bind mounts).
- Using watermarks to coordinate change data capture in PostgreSQL
-
I like that the discussion on the different approaches. Every blog post advocating for a solution should describe possible options with pros/cons for each: your mileage may vary!