Week 73

A pretty slow and sluggish week, but some momentum carried in the end. There was a disappointment after a glimmer of excitement when gemini 3 Flash dropped for the experiments that I was running for extraction of documents. It was maybe just the timing, but after this seeing code execution from chats, it was amazing. A good end to the work week.

I have continued to write Advent of SQL for the past 4 days, and brought back the streak of writing SQLog. I was not able to ship some code over the past weekend. But this weekend, I am pumped. I have time sorted out. Would be shipping some improvements in the website. Oh! I actually added snowball and particles based on season on my website (only index and post pages).

Last weekend, I wrote 4k words in a single day in around 3 hours. I was pumped to get all in the coming week, but only managed to get 2k words in the 5 days of the week. Struggling with consistency but trying to get hang of it. I am planning to wipe the story off this weekend, a 3-4 hour session could do it. And another goal of the year completed. I can't be more happy. A novel, first draft at the end of 2025.

Quote of the week

Revenge may serve a purpose when it corrects injustice, but it loses its meaning when it is used only to satisfy one’s ego

I was continuing to read the Harry potter series, this time the third "The prisoner of Azkaban". I was observing Harry's thoughts and his intentions, he wanted to take revenge, hinted by Malfoy, he found that intriguing and wanted to kill Serius Black without a reason. However, Sirius Black wanted to kill Peter with intentions of taking revenge for his betrayal of his friend's trust. For a few moments, Harry's intentions were wrong. But time(Lupin) corrected his perspective and he got on the right side. Revenge is a good thing if used with proper intention without attaching your ego and selfish interest. However when rage hits you, you loose the decision to take proper and fair actions. One needs to be capable of handling rage and directing it to a positive outcome, or letting it burn you, because to shine bright, you need to burn.

Read

  1. Deliver Code you have proven to work as a software developer

    1. Right on! So true. merging slop without review, even slightly running against a manual test case can give you a good confidence and make you a good engineer.

    2. With more code being generated and as easy as a command, it becomes rather intimidating to review code, to accept suggestion and produce more code. But code is not a magic wand its some assumptions crumpled with logical validation, both of them contradict yet when done right, creates a software that people use and breathe.

    3. I agree to the manual as well as automated testing and LLMs will follow the pattern. If you already have tests in the codebase, it will make sure the test suite is updated when it makes a new change. There are obvious and unavoidable circumstances when you'd have to check the changes with manual test, its something that comes with the plate in the software engineering role. There is no denying in this, its a fact not an opinion.

    4. Software and accountability is opposite side of a coin, you can't let software account on its own, humans have bought its existence from their imaginations and manifestation, you need to validate and prove the thing you wanted to build.

  2. Duplicate Reports

    1. Testing guys is the vibe of AI, testing code is becoming apparent as AI can produce code in matter of seconds. Learning the fundamentals has never been so vital.

  3. The time elemet that should actually do something

    1. Another div without a functionality problem. People create standards and forget to adhere. We have so many protocols, people and developers follow them, but there could be places where no one's actually paid any attention.

    2. I am surprised there is no element to depict a time for an search engine to rely on, it relies on external factors like datepublished and other in the schema, wired. Even Google doesn't care about this tag! Pathetic.

  4. Stop crawling my html, use the API

    1. This is so funny, the API is in front of the user.. No LLM, but its so lazy to hit the API.

    2. Maybe we need another protocol for how AI should scrap data from websites, but scrapping is a thing that doesn't have a standard, or rather no one would follow it.

  5. The strange case of engineers who dismiss AI

    1. Programming is a task; software engineering is a role

    2. Maybe it feels threatening to their identity, I mean, your expertise is wrapped up in being someone who can write code. Some tool threatens that? Of course you want to dismiss it.

    3. Wow! What a statement. Just bangers.

    4. I like the way of relating things, the difference in AI coding tools from 2022 and 2025 are like Internet Explorer 11 and Chrome. It really is, they are also getting faster and cheaper (maybe not but still).

    5. I think I bet on it, use it to ship more.

Wrote

  1. Advent of SQL 2025 on databaseschool.com

    1. Day 1: Wish List

    2. Day 2: Snowballs

    3. Day 3: Hotline Messages

    4. Day 4: Winterfest Volunteers

    • I am solving the problems in SQLite, I want to dig deep, learn more ways to solve one problem. Deepen the knowledge of using various constructs.

    • So far I learnt about UNION, differences in INNER, LEFT and RIGHT JOINs and proper usage of CASE WHEN THEN END

Watched

  • Gemini 3 Flash

    • Wired model. Gemini vibes. But it does something good. It is fast. Hell fast from GPT 5.2 and what was that 3 Pro, what slow lazy models those are.

  • Mostly Technical: Hearts and Minds

    • Boy I have some thoughts here.

    1. Aaron's AI Stack > Claude Opus 4.5, Amp Code, Code Rabbit for review

    2. Ship code, no one cares how its done

    3. Have an idea > research > plan > throw it to AI > look at it, stare at it > ship it

    4. What is the perfect abstraction, no, what can I get shipped.

    5. I like to code, but I loved implementing ideas, now its easier to code with AI, it knows the patterns and abstractions. You have to eyeball the code slop it generates.

    6. AI to check in AI, I was too not sure of, but lately the Seer bot from Sentry is so cool, it picks up grave stuff.

    7. You need the human, flavour is the juice.

    8. People can produce code, but not software, you have to have a point of view

    9. I have more then ever to build, the need of software engineers is going to get more. Maybe, I don't know. They would need a person who can steer them.

    10. Its a great time to study systems, and not specific frameworks. Argh

      1. I hate to say that, but I disagree here. We need to know the tools, not specificity but still, humans are nerdy people they can't live without doing or learning something, even if that is pointless.

      2. Learning Systems, true, I agree wholeheartedly to that. Maybe he means in the terms of content creation. People are not going to watch or read such specific guides to tech framework and tools, but broader skills than technical details.

      3. But I still think having the knowledge of specific tech or tool will give you the edge over the one slopping and producing slop when the time comes.

    11. Human's shared experience is something I am starting to consume more. Or rather consuming just that. No one likes AI slop, look at hackernews, people are reading experiences of x person using y ai tool to get things done.

    12. The point of Aaron on shared experience on Pride and Prejudice written by human, is something people are still consuming and talking about after a decade or more. But what about PaLM? Do you remember the model? Noooo. We need human connection.

    13. The idea train from Ian is contagious, I am running it something on my brain to think of something to make in SQL or some code.

Learnt

  • Google AI Studio has Code Execution ability

  • Difference between INNER, LEFT and RIGHT JOIN

    • In INNER JOIN, the rows are include from either of the tables in a single relation only if the condition is met.

    • In LEFT JOIN, the records in the first table (left) are included no matter what the condition is, even if there is no relation in the right or next tables, it would populate a NULL record for those.

    • In RIGHT JOIN, the records in the last table (right) are include no matter what the condition is, even if there are no relation in the left table, it would populate a NULL record in the left table for making the right record shown in the final result set.

  • If you want to merge two tables, you need to use UNIONto make sure duplicates are discarded.

    • Its like a set, two tables, you need the union of both the sets, and remove the duplicates.

  • Use count and case based increment when we need separate count from the same table.

    • SELECT COUNT(CASE WHEN status = 'approved' THEN 1 END) AS approved_count, COUNT(CASE WHEN status IS NULL THEN 1 END) AS in_review_count FROM hotline_messages;

    • Here, we are counting approved and in review count form the same table.

Tech News

  • Google Releases

    • Gemini 3 Flash

      • A good jump, the preview model hmm, from the tests I have done on OCR, it struggled from teh 2.5 Flash. Maybe let's wait to make it stable.

    • Function Gemma

      • A 270 Million parameter fine-tuned model especially for function calling and following instructions

      • This looks really promising, can't wait to build something on the phone or the cloud with it.

    • T5Gemma2

      • This is a 270 M, 1B and 4B parameter with multimodal and mulitlingual capabilities, it has a long context of 128K.

      • This again stands a good balance from lightweight to intelligence ratio, highly a good candidate for making people transition into full on AI systems. I don't know if it would lead to good or bad outcomes but a good step from Google.

  • Open AI release GPT Image 1.5

    • Competition is harsh here, Nano-banana is so good. yet its a little behind now. I don't know much about Nano banana Pro, but Image 1.5 might fall behind in its speed. Look at Nano banana, its zip zap image, Imagen is a slog. Not sure from the API though.

  • Astral launches ty, a fast Python type checker and LSP

    • They are single handedly taking Python ecosystem to a spin, they are crushing it.

That's it from this week, pretty much a good week. Things are shifting in software from writing code to testing it. Not sure what awaits for us, the software engineers.

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See you next week!

Happy Coding

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