Who needs negative UTC offsets?
We were discussing time zones at work, and suddenly I had a refreshing thought: why do we have negative UTC offsets? This regularly causes bugs when translating times to dates. […]
Using “new” suffix for versioning is an antipattern
A typical story: your project has an internal component named xyz, you develop a new version and name it, of course, xyz_new. Is it a good idea? I don’t think […]
USB-C connector hook is only 0.25mm wide
My phone’s USB-C connector was having problems holding on to cables for a long while, and today it finally stopped working altogether: the cable will pop out no matter what […]
Cursor and Unit Tests
I am using quite a bit of “vibe”-ish coding at my new job. I actually like it, but… Some day I will probably write a proper post about it, but […]
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 […]