Latest Blog Posts

• Fast Wiktionary Omnibar Searching for Language Learning (Firefox)

  So…I have just started learning German just for fun, and I’ve started to get clicking fatigue from clicking through so many dictionary webpages for every single new word that I’m learning. Typing words into a search bar and then scrolling down to your desired language takes up a lot of time. In particular, I’m using Wiktionary as my reference dictionary, and due to the massive number of languages that they support, it is quite easy to find yourself with a table of contents that looks something like this:

  Mar 27, 2022 Read more...

• Hosting Your Private NPM Packages on GitLab's Private NPM Registry

  You’ve got some shared front-end code that you would like to share between different projects. You want to abstract this shared code out into a library, thereby making it easy to install, share, or even pick-and-choose which JS modules to import. Sounds enticing, right? Yes, it most certainly is. There are many benefits of doing so, such as separation of concerns, code organization, etc… So you’re convinced. You’re sold. You head to the GitLab NPM registry documentation page and immediately, you’re discouraged.

  Jul 21, 2021 Read more...

• Optimizing Your Learning and Thinking

  I think that it pays to have an optimized workflow of the actual learning process. After all, if you learning efficiency is only at 60%, then that means that out of 10 hours that you put into learning a particular piece of knowledge, you would only retain 60% of the information spread out across those 10 hours, leaving gaps within your knowledge after that 10 hours (meaning that you would have to go back and revise parts that you are not sure of again…).

  May 3, 2021 Read more...

• Using A Hunky Poolboy To Manage Your Python ErlPort Processes in Elixir

  So, you’ve got lots of Python code being executed from your Elixir app, and lots of ad-hoc calling of your Python code. On one hand, you want to dynamically scale to manage demand, but at the same time, you don’t want to accidentally crash your application by starting too many Python processes. So… what what’s a frazzled developer gotta do to save himself some headache? The key problem that we are trying to solve here pooling, which is the the management of limited resources kept at the ready for any ad-hoc requests for usage.

  Apr 25, 2021 Read more...

• Why Erlang/Elixir? A Fanboy's Argument for Scalable, Distributed, Concurrent Programming While Staying Sane

  I think that it isn’t a well kept secret that I’m a fanboy of Elixir. Almost half of my blog posts (at point of writing) are related to Elixir and its ecosystem. But, how exactly did I get to this point? And why? In this post, let’s deep dive into what makes Erlang/Elixir so special and why the latest innovations out of this ecosystem keeps me coming back for more.

  Apr 23, 2021 Read more...

• Using Embedded Schemas for Easy Peasy Ecto Preloading

  Structs in Elixir are great, they let you define some data structure and lets you do all sorts of nifty stuff like default values. But what if you want to use this particular struct inside of an Ecto query and then preload associations based on a given field? An Example Problem We have a struct called Deal, which is build dynamically from an SQL query. This means that there is no table associated with our Deal structs.

  Dec 28, 2020 Read more...

• Using Common Table Expressions for Temporary Tables in Elixir (Ecto)

  Ocassionally, when you’ve got lots of business logic defined, you may need to perform some heavy calculations outside of your main SQL query and then join back the calculated result set into your final query to perform some statistical final calculation. Usually, the calculated result set would be in the form of a list of maps or list of tuples. Thankfully, we can use Ecto.Query.with_cte/3 to help with this. With the help of the PostgreSQL function unnest, we can interpolate arrays into the query while also defining the data type for that temporary column.

  Dec 6, 2020 Read more...

• Deploying a Trained SpaCy Model As a Python Sub-Package

  So you’ve trained your spaCy NLP model, you’ve got it to the highest accuracy you can push it to, and now you want to use it in your project or product. Now, what do you do? If we were to take a glance at the official spaCy documentation for packaging, they advise using their command line interface to build a deployable Python package containing the model. This results in a package that can then be imported as follows:

  Oct 31, 2020 Read more...