AI
Claude Code may be one of the most exciting product releases since ChatGPT. It's been out since early February this year and I started using it a couple weeks ago, but it's consistently blowing my mind. I had been planning a project to replace a critical
Personal
Another year is coming to a close, so it’s time for another annual review! This has become a personal tradition, check out last year’s review if you haven’t done so already! Early in 2024, I was working hard on building CodeTrail, a new take on documentation for
Systems Architecture
Before joining Inngest earlier this year, I had never used Redis (or its successor, Valkey) or any comparable system. Whenever I planned data persistence for a new service architecture, I would choose a reliable data store like Postgres. I would argue that ACID guarantees and a track record of stability
Inngest
Hey! It’s been pretty quiet around here for a while — more than I’d like but it’s been a busy couple of months since I joined Inngest earlier this year in April. I’m completing some personal projects too at the moment and trying to get back to
Systems Architecture
At Inngest, we serve hundreds of millions of events per day. Each event can trigger a function run comprising multiple steps. Users can return blobs and other data from these steps, necessitating incredibly fast reads and writes to our data store to keep latency as low as possible. Function runs
Systems Architecture
In my last post, I talked about the benefits of using interfaces in Go. In short, interfaces are a powerful tool to specify the behavior of objects. However, Go interfaces lack a mechanism to specify a predefined set of errors that can be returned to narrow the definition, such as
Systems Architecture
Interfaces hide implementation details by specifying the capabilities or behavior of an object. This concept has appeared in different programming languages over time, using different terms like traits or protocols. The same rules apply in Go, take the classic example of io.Reader: type Reader interface { Read(p []byte) (n
Systems Architecture
Imagine you’re building an app and want to ensure that requests don’t feel slow for the end user. Let’s say you’re working on a signup flow that needs to send an activation email and update external systems like billing and a CRM. You don’t really
Systems Architecture
In most successful companies, products and their underlying infrastructure are constantly evolving to changing needs and growing demand. Shipping new features, improvements, or other changes can require careful planning ahead of a release. While you can try to imagine and rule out different failure scenarios ahead of time, you never
Golang
The internet has grown from a couple of research lab sites to a vibrant ecosystem of content and services. Without the ability to resolve human-readable names to machine identifiers, however, it’d be impossible to find anything in the ever-growing web of interconnected systems. In November 1987, RFC 1034 and
Personal
In the coming decades, there’s only going to be more software to build, operate, and scale for platforms we’re only just inventing, with code running on nearly everything we interact with day to day. To help advance the current frontier into AI, which is built on massively distributed
Systems Architecture
You might have noticed a recent addition to the top right corner of this blog: I’ve added a global search experience. More specifically, I’ve implemented a hybrid search solution based on OpenAI Embeddings, Supabase, and PostgreSQL full-text search. In this post, I’d like to run through the
React
Rich-text editors power knowledge-sharing and content creation on the web. Back in the day, WYSIWYG editors for building blogs and submitting comments on websites were all the rage. Nowadays, products like Notion lead the way in simplifying the editing experience while enabling powerful use cases. If the editor works, we
Python
I’ve recently had the honor to debug a Python script that was consuming more memory than it takes to run a full-sized LLM locally. The purpose of the script wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, it was reading a CSV file and performing some analytics on it. The
Systems Architecture
Now that everyone and their dog have tried out Generative AI, teams around the globe are wondering how they can incorporate LLMs into their products for an upcoming fundraising effort or, hopefully, to create a great experience for their customers and solve some real problems. In recent months, countless reports
Systems Architecture
For the last couple of days, I pushed through the tedious task of setting up a Markdown parser and formatter in Java consistent with our existing system written in TypeScript. For this first iteration, I decided to customize flexmark-java, a popular Markdown parser library for Java based on the commonmark-java
Personal
Tonight, 2023 is coming to an end, and I’m still wondering where the last months went. I feel like a broken record repeating that time is accelerating year by year, so naturally I’m going to say that the past twelve months felt like the busiest yet. Platitudes aside,
Learning
Learning new languages, sports, and other skills is hard work. You’ll have to put in the hours to get better, step by step. Even if you have a natural inclination toward a specific skill, your brain isn’t designed to excel at, let’s say, freestyle ice skating. You
Startups
Conventional wisdom tells founders it’s better to be a small fish in an ocean as opposed to a big fish in a tiny pond. For me, the thought of starting a new business when well-funded competition existed was daunting. Recently, I’ve changed my mind on this. Let’s
Video Production
Recording videos always seemed like a huge ordeal to me. For a good demo, not only do you make sure that everything works, hope that you’ve selected the right mic (sorry Tim), and select the right window to record, you need to set up the environment just right. This
Productivity
When the whole world is fighting for your attention, it’s hard not to get distracted. It’s just so easy to drift off. Maybe the following situation feels familiar: You wanted to read your DMs and sneak a peek of your feed. Suddenly an hour has passed, leaving you
Systems Architecture
Recently, I’ve gotten to wrap my head around versioning again. If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you might remember that I wrote a post about API versioning in mid-2021. Back then, I focused on versioning API-first developer products. This problem was relatively contained, we used
Electron
Last week, I wrote about releasing Electron applications on macOS, going into detail on the specific steps required to go from source code to packaged application. Building your app on your development machine is one thing, but ideally, you want to publish new builds as soon as a commit is
Electron
Staying close to last week’s post on figuring out the state architecture for Electron applications, this week I’m looking into builds for macOS. Even without Electron, building applications for macOS entails a lot of steps to go from your code to shipping a packaged binary to your users,
Electron
In some communities, Electron has become a controversial choice for building new applications, yet it offers a nearly unmatched possibility of moving fast compared to native frameworks like SwiftUI, especially when your team is experienced in building web applications. For an upcoming product, we’ve decided to build an MVP
Golang
Even though there’s no way around handling JSON in web services nowadays, the developer experience between different programming languages varies significantly. I had the joy of fiddling around with Go’s particular implementation a while ago, which motivated me to do a follow-up post on embedding types in Go.
Startups
I can’t say for sure whether it was late 2012 or early 2013 but around that time I probably wrote my first, very scrappy, lines of code. Back then it didn’t dawn on me that I was about to embark on a career path that would open up
Gradients & Grit
In case you didn’t see the news, I recently launched Gradients & Grit, a new publication at the intersection of software engineering, AI, and UX. In our first issue, we introduced PromptCanvas, an interactive spatial prompt experience. As the name says, building PromptCanvas involved building a canvas interface similar
Neural Networks
While ML is all the rage right now, it is important to understand the fundamentals powering the incredible breakthroughs in fields like natural language processing (NLP), computer vision (CV), and generative AI in the past years. While there are many resources available, Andrew Ng’s courses at deeplearning.ai have
Startups
I’ve always loathed working on tasks that don’t create actual value for anyone, such as preparing read decks for potential investors. You know that nobody really takes their time to read what you spent days of your life working on, but traditional institutions and government programs with a
Design
Designing user interfaces can seem like a notoriously hard task, especially when you’re used to seeing highly-polished results from the work of multiple designers in bigger teams. When you only have an idea in mind, it can be hard to get it onto (virtual) paper. Most design sessions started
Productivity
In recent months, with the general availability of increasingly powerful large language models (LLMs) like GPT4 I’ve noticed a change in my work-related browsing behavior, away from blogs and forums like StackOverflow. The reason for this is simple: Whereas the good old internet required you to get really good
Systems Architecture
Typically, installing one of the major Linux distributions like Ubuntu or Debian requires going through an interactive installation wizard. This is great when you have a screen and keyboard but less ergonomic in a virtualized scenario, for example when you’re running in qemu/kvm. I recently learned that, luckily,
Systems Architecture
Lately, I’ve been exploring x86 Linux machines for building and running a Kubernetes development environment. Since I’m using an Apple Silicon MBP as my daily driver, I had to get creative and tried a couple of options ending on a pretty robust workflow I wanted to outline. Throughout
Systems Architecture
Kubernetes is equally loved and loathed for its extreme flexibility which comes with a high cost of complexity. For a research project, I was looking into ways to extend the Kubernetes Scheduler (kube-scheduler) with awareness of FPGAs. More precisely, I wanted to make sure that each node could advertise several
Anzu
You might have been wondering why my publishing cadence has shifted back to the initial bi-weekly schedule instead of the weekly posts you’re used to. There are multiple reasons, the main one being that I’m working hard on Anzu, the new company I’m founding. As with all
Machine Learning
Last night, I started watching a recent show which includes dialogues in multiple languages, so naturally, I wondered if I could use OpenAI’s Whisper model to transcribe and translate audio to subtitles in real time. I hadn’t used it in the past, so there was some initial research
Anzu
Every day, someone out there has a new idea worth looking into. Maybe it’s a problem they came across at work, or maybe it’s an issue a friend told them about. Now, you might be thinking more people are facing the same problem and making the solution available
Systems Architecture
If you’ve worked on a product that depends on multiple services and surrounding cloud resources, you’ve probably wondered about the best way to set things up for local development. Most teams default to the good old Docker Compose setup supported by some scripts, and that works until you
Studies
Let’s start this post with a simple observation: The better students are prepared for the real world, the easier it is to onboard them after graduation. The more skills students pick up at university, the more attractive they become to future employers. The more the economy benefits from talented
TypeScript
Around four months ago, I shared a story of how we were trying to solve the problem of sharing code for Anzu. As we are building both our frontend and backend with TypeScript, we thought it should be easy enough to share parts between both sides, from types to functions.
C
Happy new year! A lot of things have been set in motion since my recent announcement, so I’ll focus on a shorter guide this week, which will nonetheless be very interesting if you’ve always wondered what bitwise operators could be useful for. Imagine you’re working with a
Personal
I’ve always enjoyed building software and solving problems. Back in 2012, I started hacking around with Java to build Minecraft plugins for me and my friends to enjoy. It took way longer than I’d like to admit until I got the first version running successfully, and I absolutely
Annual Review
2022 is slowly coming to an end and I’m still trying to process this eventful year. As with every year, I had set out to follow a personal roadmap the past year, consistently building toward the long-term goal of running Anzu with my good friend, Tim. On the other
Node.js
Setting up billing for your SaaS product inevitably forces you to think about billing periods: While you may opt for a monthly subscription plan, certain customers may prefer different schedules like annual or semi-annual payments, especially when you’re closing enterprise deals. Chances are you’re using an external provider
ClickHouse
ClickHouse is the up-and-coming solution for processing large-scale analytics data without having to worry about the complex architecture that is usually required. Originally built by Yandex for their web analytics competitor to Google Analytics, ClickHouse has found widespread adoption (Cloudflare, Vercel via SplitBee, Microsoft, Uber, Bytedance, Stellate, and more) for
Frontend
React has been out in the open for almost a decade now, and the ecosystem has grown exponentially. Pretty much every large company uses React for parts of their stack, and few competing frameworks have come close to attracting a similar market share. I think there are two reasons for
Systems Architecture
When working on projects in the past, I’ve always wondered about the perfect time to lock down interfaces. In the first steps of building an idea, you’re not quite sure what data you need to exchange yet and which operations should be exposed via APIs. Perhaps you don’
Systems Architecture
This post goes over some of our architecture work for the first iteration of Anzu. We’re currently hard at work building the next big step to get closer to our vision of helping teams ship faster, so make sure to check this blog out for updates regularly. If you
Product Development
When you’re building your first product, you need something going for it. Especially if you’re not solving a completely unsolved problem (read: customers would accept anything, no matter the lack of polish), you need to offer an experience that beats the existing solution. You may remember me writing
Observations
A couple of weeks ago, I ordered the Pro Apps Bundle for Education from the Apple Store. What I didn’t expect was insight into the processes of the biggest corporations. For now, let’s step back and follow the events! Initially, I was interested in getting a copy of
Startups
When I think about “successful” companies in the SaaS space, there is a group that quickly comes to mind. Irrespective of revenue numbers, or knowledge about internal processes, some teams keep on delivering and people notice. In the following, I’ll go over some products I’ve been using and
Systems Architecture
This post is the second part of a series on exploring the benefits and drawbacks of engineering for the application and database layer. If you haven’t done so, check out the first post on reducing database roundtrips. When you’re working with databases, you may be inclined to offload
Anzu
This post is part of the Behind the Scenes series on building the first iteration of Anzu. While we’re working hard on the upcoming iteration, I felt it would be useful to look back on the achievements and downsides of the first version of our product. If you didn’
Systems Architecture
Relational databases have been at the foundation of the internet for the past four decades. What was built for business workflows in the past is now used for building dynamic applications powered by user-generated data. Sortable relations are one of the most important features in database modeling: Whether we’re