SMTP Mailer: choosing replacement for SendGrid
TL;DR. I ended up using Smtp2Go My website uses minimal email traffic, but it does send emails from time to time: mostly to myself as notifications. I could probably get […]
Difference between Docker and Virtual Machine
Anyone who used virtual machines (VMs) and Docker containers knows that Docker images tend to be much smaller than VM images and to start orders of magnitude faster. But why […]
LLM tokens and foreign languages
TL;DR If you use language other than English, you pay more per word sent/received from an LLM. If you don’t use Latin alphabet, you pay way more. Here’s why. LLMs […]
Redis demystified
Disclaimer: this is a summary for my records after a deep dive into current state of Redis. I tried to be as precise as possible (after all, I am writing […]
Redis: hset with ‘items’ parameter
In Python, Redis.hset function has ‘items’ that, per documentation “accepts a list of key/value pairs that will be added to hash “name“.”. You would think that it’s something like [(“key1”, […]
Writing unit tests with Cursor IDE
I created a “view model” like hook in React, and asked Cursor to write unit tests for it. The hook does not have any HTML code, but it uses a […]
More fun with recursive types in Typescript
Typescript allows a type to reference another type defined further down in the same file, which can lead to rather interesting constructs. The vanilla circular reference fails: However, the following […]
Recursive Types in Typescript: safely typing JSON value
I stumbled upon the following code in production: This sort of does the job, but any is a fruit of a poisonous tree: it should have had a much more […]
Lenovo windows “recovery” media and other animals
TL;DR: Lenovo recovery media is NOT like regular Windows recovery drive. It can only factory-reset your system. No command line, no recovery from image, nothing else. Hulk smash. Don’t count […]
Typescript: this is just awesome. Substr is not the same as substring
In TypeScript (and JavaScript), both substr and substring are methods used to extract parts of a string, but they behave differently. This probably does not beat standard C++ class mt19937, […]