Meet Gor - Type: newsletter

Techstructive Weekly #84

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 UTC

Week #84

It was a life-changing week, for good or bad, not sure. But something is sure, I have made decisions that might change the coming months. Sometimes I get in a rut, especially since AIs have made it harder to think outside the box. Now is the right time to change gears.

I am excited. I have a wide open life, I feel like a free bird. I can flap my wings and choose the direction. I cannot be more privileged. I am taking time to learn things more as usual, but now, I think I will learn the old school way, hands-on, not agentic things and all. I need to level up.

Software is a field that demands constant adaptation, but this change is quite hard, every change is hard. We need to find a way through it, not around it. Let’s see what we have in the bag.

Quote of the week

“If you(your life) are about to take a leap, you’ll need to take 2 steps back, you do it willingly or life pulls you back”
— Meet

If you have been experiencing a setback, don’t fear or get scared or heartbroken. Get excited, life is preparing you for a leap of faith. Trust the timing of the universe, trust the direction, if you did everything right till now, consider it life’s intertwining to uplifit you, get to your destined place. I am not talking philosophically, it is science. If you want to jump, you’ll have to take two steps back, reflect and then act. You can’t jump from the current position, even if you can, you can’t move much further.

Things keep changing and it won’t be long before everything gets clear and you’d realize it was all working to make it fit together, they were puzzle pieces trying to fit.

Read

You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to
1. Man that is banger of a post, I just read 10% of it and was smiling and was in peace. content.
2. There is someone who understands this pain of working with AI.
3. I want to read this article, its too long, but I want to feel it. Weekends are for that.
Antidote
1. The article has lived to its name. It truly has and is an antidote. Just read it. Read it I said.
2. Just do things like you used to do before AI, AI is just a tool, it is not necessary to shove it all the places and situations. Be candid, be original, make stuff just because you can.
MicroGPT
1. This is beautiful! I used custom list of names of Pokemon, Places and LLM Model names.
2. This is so cool, I still don’t get it, I want to read the code, and build something different from it. So much to do, so little time.
You can use newline characters in URLs
1. This is wired, I never thought about it, does that really work? I can see this being used for Base64 encoded images.
2. Worth knowing. Better presentable HTML.
Is traditional software engineering dead - Naval Ravikant
1. Nope, this is true.
  But software engineers still have two massive advantages on you. First, they think in code, so they actually know what’s going on underneath. And all abstractions are leaky. So when you have a computer programming for you—when you have Claude Code or equivalent programming for you—it’s going to make mistakes.
  - It gives me hope.
  - Not sure because, he is not a software developer, so cannot really fathom how he can commet those all things, but good points.
747 and Coding Agents
1. Really good comparison. I feel like a pilot than an engineer now. Really good.
  Yes, the learning is becoming the most least focused thing.
2. Finally people realise that it is happening. The change is too big of a deal, and its just shaking the grounds of software like crazy.
Stop using Pickle
1. Pickle and waste?
2. Ok I can understand the pain here. The pickle file is not readable except for that python program.
3. By using some other standard format, it can help in reusing of data

Watched

Peter Steinberger with OpenAI and OpenClaw
- He just knew a lot of software, so he can do it, I am not there yet, I need to write and read a lot more code to be there.
- This is fine, I think, as long as we can understand what the code is getting generated, I would feel nice to just let AIs do it.
Software Engineering is dead now
- Ah! This is bad. I didn’t realise it till wednesday. Things just hit like truck. Really sad for so many people, atleast they have 6 months, though the times are tricky, the hiring might be wired place. Its not the same, people have confusion on what actual software would mean in 1 year of time. I can hardly think what I will work with in the next month.

Did Kellogs do the math right?
- Nerd stuff. Really cool to see it.
- Really, spheres can cover more surface area for filings than donut shapes, really intriguing.

Learnt

TCP Protocol.
- Yeah! I didn’t knew how it worked internally. I learnt that it:
  - Opens a port for listening to clients
  - Client connects to the port with 3 way handshake
    - SYN (share the client sequence number)
    - SYN-ACK (server recieves teh sequence number and sends its own sequence number)
    - ACK (client sends the server sequence number +1, indicating it recieved the servers sequence number)
  - Read from the client body
  - Write to the client
- Its basically a protocol to communicate, it doesn’t define what to communicate with, the client can send anything. There are protocols built on top of it to do specific format request and responses like HTTP, Redis, SMTP and dozens of others.
Tail -f
- We can listen to file and it can automatically show the last 10 lines if there were any updates. Just wow, perfect for log analysis or monitoring

Tech News

Google releases Gemini 3.1 Flash lite
- This is a bold claim, that a cheaper and faster model is better than 2.5 Flash. Flash was a one of a kind shattering all records model when it launched last year. I am really looking to test it out on few things. If available on free tiers.
OpenAI releases GPT 5.4
- Damm! OpenAI just keeps banging version bumps one after other. Every month they have something to release. Just wild.
Apple launches Macbook Neo
- Well! Now people would be seen with office and college laptops as Macbook Neo I guess, cheaper and premium look. Do they really care if video editing doesn’t work, probably not.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#785th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from this week. It was a tough one to digest, but now there is no turning back, oh I have already two steps back, time for a leap of faith and change. Cannot be more excited for the coming week, for what life has in the pack.

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #83

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 UTC

Week #83

It was a lazy week, I’ll put it straight. I don’t know what I should be doing or not doing. LLMs are crazy. I can get lost in them without realizing how much time has been spend (also cost). Same thing happened with books this week, I almost read 700 pages this week. I don’t know how, I just was lost in the books. I finished the harry potter series. I was struggling with the half blood prince on 25% last week, but I powered through it and completed both the books and here I am.

This is not a book rating newsletter but I say one thing. Reading books can change your perspective and not restricted to any one field. I think I saw a lot of inspiration for fighting against the dark arts or LLMs. No, not fighting against LLMs but sort of understanding when to let it rip through itself and when to strike. It was like Horcrux and Hallow. Not quite but something. No I am not trying to mash up anything I read to LLMs, it was just natural. I’ll leave it for another article.

But the point is, its getting lost. The art of code, its already is. We can’t write, the hard work is automated, just like that in a puff. There were people around me who always told me “Code is the last thing to care about”. But I was of the other opinion. Because writing code gave me clarity, it gave me direction, it was a validation of where I am going. But now its not quite like it. You can’t enjoy without feeling. I am an idiot here, stubborn talking about it. Next week I might be euphoric about using LLMs. No point in blabbering and hating it.

Quote of the week

“Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all those who live without love.”

― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

A touch of gold that quote is. Summarizes the full series in beautiful words. Just brilliantly done. Changes the perspective of the mind, the intention and the affection. I was literally crying after reading that, I was numb after reading that quote and didn’t read for minutes. That line just moved me.

Pity for the living who live without love. What a hitting stone. Pity the LLMs, pity the people who can’t fathom the care for art. I am just dropping that quote here. I just have no words to describe what I feel. Its beyond senses. Beyond the power of words, because to feel the words you need to experience pain and life, for life is sometimes pain.

Read

Writing code is cheap now

“The biggest challenge in adopting agentic engineering practices is getting comfortable with the consequences of the fact that writing code is cheap now.”

- Banger, yes can agree to that. Turning that code to production grade is hell of a task. It seems so flawless that its tempting to just push it straight. But tests my god tests are like verataserum for those ai slop.

“Delivering new code has dropped in price to almost free... but delivering good code remains significantly more expensive than that.”

- Yes totally.

“These best practices are still being figured out across our industry. I’m still figuring them out myself.”

- Honestly he is the best one to put this way. Everyone thinks they know how it works, but having that probabilistic factor is very rough especially for thinking of code in a new way.
Hoard things you know how to do
- This is an interesting idea, I can think that those all things that we can do could be a test on how good or bad the models are getting. Right now there are a few things that I can do and feels a bit awkward to do, so LLMs are a good point to tuck in.
- Also the labour job of writing code is away now, no denying that. It was in the ChatGPT phase too. But now it can do at scale with the full context.
Google API Keys weren’t Secrets but then Gemini arrived
- This is funny and scary at the same time. Funny because how carelessly the single API Key exposed the full Google access, scary because how can such thing at Google scale happen.
- Kind of wired how they handled these. It felt a bit rushed and then never looked at. They wanted AI to be in the hands of everyone and everything. So I think that might be a decision somewhere that for AI studio it should be that but they mistakenly made it for all products accessible from the API Key.
This time is different
- It is always different right? In tech, no change is the same, that’s why its called change right? But people think every change as revolution, and this is like that which hits like a truck after the hype has faded out.
Google street View in 2026
- The indian region looks full of street views, shows how conjusted and cramped everything in India is. Peace is a luxury in India, though people have a unique way of finding peace in chaos.
We build a app to read books with LLMs - Merrilin
- This looks good, I want to build something like this. Recently I have been devouring books like crazy and have found myself typing 100s of queries to google (not GPT) to understand the plot deeper and certain quotes that I didn’t understand.
- Might not be a good thing to add while reading a book, but as a companion to talk to is a good direction.

Watched

Anthropic is lying to us
- I don’t want to start another week of dunking on Anthropic but this doesn’t seem to end.
- They think using their APIs is against rights, but scraping internet and training claude is not? Well they should get more of these now, let them taste their own medicine.
- I am starting to get a hatred for them now. Can’t bear them.
We used to be gamers
- This was a fun one. Really enjoyed the banter. I was also a novice gamer with my friends in teens. I used to play Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Brawl Stars, Minecraft. Those were the times.
- Now it feels like a dread and creep, almost like wastage of life, not time even. I know, I know I am not a productive-rambling person. But it just, I don’t like playing games anymore, there are other things for me to enjoy and sip my soul in.

Learnt

Its quite a problem to now say yourself a software developer.
- The right term would be a “good software developer”. Because software has become a commodity. Models can write code and build software, but “good” is a relative term.
- The taste, the experience, the curiosity and the grit. These qualities are not in LLMs (yet). But there are others which humans can’t compete like speed, intelligence and availability.
- I don’t know who would trade of which things for humans but it looks a good trade of if someone just wants to get the foot on the market. The bar has not lowered though, the steps have. The gate is still tall to climb.

Tech News

Nano Banana 2
- This looks another bump in image generation models. I think image generation has plateaued. Except for Sora and Nano Banana, we haven’t seen any growth in the past year.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#784th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from this week. Hoping to get something out in the next week with code. Weekend is all packed with plans. A bit humanesque-friend gathering after almost a year, I am tired of talking with LLMs. See ya next week.

Till then keep churning tokens!

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #82

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 UTC

Week #82

A pretty heavy week. Things getting cooked up for developers. Shift in how to develop features. It feels a bit awkward that management people are teaching developers how to code now. Wired times. The craft is officially dead, long live code writing by hand.

I am sad, but not that sad. It feels like something valuable is being snatched from my hands, but something more powerful is given back, but I don’t know how to process it. Just like when our parents have mobile phone in their hands for the first time. Or we have rubiks cube in our hands. Its quite a powerful tool, LLMs. For that I don’t have a brainpower to process what it spits out, the steering and orchestrating are the skills that developer like me lack like shit and this is exactly what we are put in.

I am ready for a change. I don’t resist it, its just a wired times where all are learning how to play with them and nobody knows what and how to deal with them. They think they know if they have gotten one or two projects right, but the models are evolving at a lightning fast speed. Keeping up with all of that is a chaos.

Quote of the week

“A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because its trust is not on the branch but on its own wings.” ― Charlie Wardle, Understanding & Building Confidence

Great quote. And rightly so for todays developer facing the dilemma of AI threat. Do you trust your fundamental skills or AI’s next token prediction? That quote just liberated me from that question. And honestly it came naturally, I accidentally stumbled on bing search due to a link opened on my browser to it, and I clicked on home, but it redirected me to the quote of the day and it was that. Wild! But yes, we need to trust the learning that we have gained so far, the hardships, the errors and bugs we have solved so far. I sound like cringe right? But for a developer battling and grappling with these questions is in need of these words to help him understand he is not alone. Everyone is figuring things out, everyone is one that kind of branch which can collapse anytime, might not, but you have wings you know how to code, so don’t you worry. You can fly if things break you, a bird never things aeroplanes can threaten them. Do they?

Created

GCP Log Explorer TUI
- This was a long due project. Finally made the courage to throw it with full force. Its not complete but is way better than what I would have imagined, it is functional and has a ton of options. Maybe I need to think again of the UI elements and decisions, but its a good start.
- I built it with amp for the initial scafold, its quite fast it churned the full project within 10-20 minutes. Then it was broken badly, nothing was working. I handed over to codex with the tmux capture test idea and it just ripped the project apart for 1 hour and gave that project that we have right now. 0 lines of code touched by me. Mind boggling.
ClickUp TUI
- ClickUp oh dear! The time I might have waited for it to load, would have been the equal amount of time writing in the clickup space. The UI is horrifyingly slow.
- I though TUI might help, but I think I am getting proven wrong by themselves, their API seems to be slow and the UI bloat is baggage burden.

Read

Why I am not worried about AI job loss
- Humans will still be the bottleneck. I kind of agree to that. Because in the end it is humans who will perceive the tasks, they can’t have super-intelligence if none of the people who work with it are even intelligent.
- Guys, learning is going to be quite critical. The past couple of years have changed the way we perceive learning. I think we are getting into a trap of outsourcing the thinking and eventually learning to LLMs, which is looking a bad direction, and the turn needs to be as steep as possible to get back on track.

“GPT-3 has been out for six years; GPT-4 for three; and none of that has happened. Even in the outsourced customer service sector, the lowest-hanging fruit on the automation tree, we’re just not yet seeing mass layoffs due to AI. I’ll be frank in telling you that this has been a huge surprise to me. (And to others.) There is change, but it is gradual; it looks more like standard technological diffusion than a tsunami of replacement. And we should think seriously about why this has been the case.”

- This quoted paragraph gives me hope to continue learning more.

“people have responded by spending much more time coding than they used to, because the latent demand for software is so enormous.1“

- This I must say is true again.

“If we don’t need jobs, we’ll still invent them”

- Yeah! That is the spirit, that is the mindset people need to inculcate, and not panic or get lost in the existential dread. I am saying this to myself, because written words have power over vague mind conversations.
- Its going to be fine. Humans will live or die, either ways, it doesn’t even have a 0.000000001 % or 10^-100000000000000000 effect on the universe.
Building TUIs in easier now
- Banger! Banger of a post. It just blew my mind, when I asked it to test with tmux.
- Yeah! I created 2 TUIs on that day. One is complete 90%) functional and here is the link. The other one is janky, because the UI is too.
- I loved this article. It gave me a good advice to test tuis since it can understand text, tmux has options to capture text from sessions, which just open a wide variety of programmable automation and testing.
Peter Steinberger to join OpenAI
- This is huge. It also is showing the rift building up between Anthropic and OpenAI. The one taking the advantage of the mistakes of the other. And OpenAI I must say has not placed a foot wrong in 2026. Anthropic on the other hand has ruined itself with a few already.
- I take my words back for now, Anthropic was Gryffindor but it choose to be evil and should be in Slytherin. OpenAI I am not sure it is brave but so is Google. For now, OpenAI is Gryffindor for me. Brave and Generous, expensive yes but better from the competition.
Desensitized to AI Hype until tried Opus 4.5
- Yes,very well put. The gap in everything is wide. The shift of perceiving software is changed 180 degrees. There is wide gap of what code is generated and what is shipped, the knowledge of developers, the usage of models, the landscape of product, its all widening like crazy.

Watched

Opus and Codex Models
- Another banger! Sort of proving my experience too.
- I was working with amp (it uses claude models in free tier with rate limits) for creating TUI for Clickup, I asked it a feature for opening the task when supplied with a link when opening the TUI. Like clickuptui --link clickuptask-link. It was not able to load or understand the things. It added the feature but was not working. I asked it to fix it, it was not working. It just removed the feature! Like what? It just removes the problem out of the way rather than untangling it.
- Then I switched to codex and it solved the problem, slow yes but it did it.
- Amazing how each of these types of LLMs are evolving.
Anthropic is a Cult
- More and more things are getting verified it seems. Anthropic is just on a brag mode. It thinks it is a superior or a pure-blood kind of race. Really they are wired about how they perceive intelligence.
- I am annoyed by them now. They have good models, but the vibes are not feeling good.
Dario Amodei - Dwarkesh Patel Podcast
- Cringe as hell! I feel a greed and haste in earning profit and not humanity in the sight. He gave a example of curing diseases, but has he thought what is the other side of this mess? They are sort of up to something which is not quite clear.
- The idea of “country of genuises in a datacenter“ is quite ambitious and good, but is the curing of disease the only task? Is it only to replace talented humans? Replace art with slop? I don’t like that thinking of automating the intelligence part. It just gives too much knowledge without our brains having the speed and capability to handle.
The real reason Anthropic built a Compiler
- This week is dunking on Anthropic and I will do it with heart. I also thought it was “from scratch”. Well, there are quite a lot of astericks forgotten by them.
- Prime is right on the take away being, we now have agents that can coordinate for a task which can be weeks long, but Anthropic is suggesting something that causes panic and existential threat. It sound good on their words but if you just think it becomes melodrama once you see the details.

Enough Anthropic dunking, we need some other lab to step in and be a worthy crown for coding models. Deepseek V4 around the corner? Can it beat Claude for coding? Let’s see!

Learnt

Agentic usage on development
- I understood on a deeper level to work with Agents.
- Ask LLMs to ask question to you. That sounds wired but think for a moment. When you used to code by hand (back in the days you know), we developers used to ask questions and get answers by compiling the code, seeing the output, and iterating. Same is the case with LLMs, they need a opening to ask questions, they code, they run code, but where is their feedback? Letting them ask you questions gives them the context in a much better and concise way. It also forces you to think about the problem you are solving.
We can use tmux capture session to get the screen captured for debugging tuis
- This was a great leaning from the blog I read and the playing around with LLMs, it was fun and exciting to see how to intuition is still vital in dealing with LLMs for coding.

Tech News

Google releases Gemini 3.1 Pro
- This is quite quick. It is better from 3 Pro but still not significant. Its also I think the first time Google has release 0.1 increase in the model, it was either 0.0 or a 0.5. Something different.
Qwen 3.5
- It is quite neck in neck with Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2 in terms of benchmarks.
- Open source models are really keeping up with the closed sourced labs, I must admit there might come a time when that would have exceeded the closed source lab capability.
Claude Sonnet 4.6
- Meh! I don’t care about Anthropic anymore. Its just annoying now to think about them after understanding their vision.
Sam Altman and Dario refused to hold hands in AI Sumit
- This not stopping guys. That is clearly a rift, a rivalry, a gryffindor and slytherin rivalry. One taking the other. Tables turn pretty quickly.
- That was embarrasing and quite evident that dario is some wiredo. lets call him that wiredo.

That’s it from this Anthropic dunk and AI revolution week. I hope I come out strong in the coming months and weeks.

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #81

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 UTC

Week #81

Its kind of a wired position to be a developer. People are talking about replacing or atleast questioning developers now. I am in awe, how a field that was the most harder to work in, suddenly gets bambolzed with little ghosts with token predicition machines. Just think about it, the industry that spent millions and billions in humans to solve problems is getting wiped out in months, if not weeks. I am scared!

Maybe it might just be the last year I be a software developer, might have to find other field to work in. Kind of feels tragic. People are making me even more scared. Do you know what to do as a software developer? A person who has spent half a decade in learning how to code, realises that the same thing can be generated in seconds. If there was an artist, who spent a decade in creating a painting, yet with AI does it take away his soul? No right? I also think coding is like the same, yet is the most least bothered thing. People don’t give a shit of how you solve the problem. And that hurts as a developer. It really does.

Quote of the week

Curiosity and Enthusiasm to learn cannot be diminished with any force of nature

I don’t know if this quote is true anymore. But I think, I will still cling to it. As again I don’t want to repeat it but being a developer the old way is no longer feasible or required or even admired. It is a new era of generation of code, you can’t start having attachment towards chilsed code, it can be replaced and generated in matter of seconds, with the right mind and intentions.

That’s why for those right mindset and intentions, a flickering fire of curiosity with a kindling touch of enthusiasm is a sustatinable approach. It might not be, for I don’t know what the future holds, I can just believe.

Read

Stop using Icons in data tables
1. This makes sense. Text makes it easy to view without the cognitive load and stuff. Really nice on the eyes too.
Why is the sky blue
1. Nothing tech, but a good article. I just like to read and don’t mind learning something out of the blue. And why actually is sky blue.
2. I think more content should be like this, interdisciplinary and broad topics. People need to now think about overlapping things.
I am happier writing code by hand
1. For the past 6 months, I was, but after a few couple of months, it feels like people are no longer in sympathy with that feeling.
2. There is no care for code, it was a art, well now it might be the lost art. I know it is hard for developers to accept it, but change is something we have in our blood. But man this is not change, it is just erasing the need to write code by hand. People are just managing this little agents instead of files now.
3. Everything is a prompt they write, a little nudge is what they see instead of a little read. I don’t know where this is going, but it can’t be reverted, that is for sure, the drug is real and it can’t just stop.
We mourn our craft
1. Damm, every post I read is this. We might be the last generation who remember writing coded by hand. Wow! We are that last era.
2. I don’t know to be proud of it or be scared. Its hard to see anything as a developer now. Am I just a prompt writer? Just a system person thinking about the problem or what even is the need to make products?
Heroku is finally officially dead
1. We saw in 2022 what happened and now this is the final nail in the coffin.
2. PaaS king that stayed for half a decade now, is almost dead. Flyio and Railway are the new kings.

Watched

Sam Altman and Theo on the future of code
- Its unncertain, but yes the learning problem in LLMs is qutie nasty.
- It doesn’t have a constant memory like humans, but it has a good brain, which might be mometary, but exceeds the capacity of humans. Maybe that is a wired statement, but it lacks something humans have, yet has something that humans don’t.

Creator of Clawd on the Pragmatic Engineer Podcast
- This is wild, he was always a nerd, a curious person. He has built a ton of things before many of his things have gone viral right? Maybe its not true for him.
- Its kind of crazy how he has just made so many fame out of building something really valuable, but then it feels almost like anyone could have made it, a problem first mind comes into picture.

Agentic Coding has a problem
- Yes, this is a problem I face, but I am not calling it a problem. I am not a fullstack guy yet, or atleast I don’t shift projects that radpidly.
- I am using the same things I used to use, tmux/zellij and normal editor in my workflow. I love agent in the cli, its great, but now I realise it is a token hungry thing, you don’t see on the screen how much junk or slop it generates behind the scene, when suddenly your cursor prompt says, “Quota limit reached”. Yeah I have been there.

GLM 5 is a great model
- This looks a leap in a good direction. Atleast we have a amazing open wieght model. Yes its not self-hostable, but we can use it to some very cheap price.

Learnt

I don’t know if I should learn anything anymore.

Yet, I have curiosity, but sometimes, the curiosity flame is wavered by a gust of doubt and guilt.

I still have a belief, I have a purpose. For that I will cease to die.

Tech News

Go 1.26 released
- Does it matter? Yes it might.
GLM 5 Released
- Really good to see open source models having such a neck-in-neck competition with the closed source labs. Worth voouching for.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#782nd edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Techstructive Weekly #80

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 UTC

Week #80

It was a exciting week. I went to co-working space which felt like ages. Created something meaningful with ai-assisted coding, and it worked charms. It helped get out of a dry slump and make better impact with code. Its me, in my mood, when I have the fire, nothing survives in front of me. Just that the fire is lost in the mundane dance of life, it throws you in valleys you never knew existed or had planned for.

Back to a grind of coding with LLMs. This week a lock in mode to ship 3 projects. Let’s see and what I can come up with. Maybe I’ll write an article about how my experience has been so far.

Lots of possibilities and exciting times ahead. Get out of your limited thinking, and just sit with your mind, negotiate and build good habits.

Quote of the week

Ram is the heart, Krishna is the mind

In the battle of kalyug, the heart is like ram and the mind is like Krishna. This is really beautifully put. You have the best of the previous two generations fighting against each other. One on the right path, the other on the right mindset. Both are important, none is completely outruled. You need peaceful mind, for that you need a pure heart like Ram, but people will take advantage of it, without a right mind, you cannot be at peace. You’ll have to survive the duel between the both, don’t get caught in the trap of helplessness, decide when to act and when to restrain. The person who can be both at the right time, is the winner here.

Created

The Daily Token Newspaper like blog
- I used meta-ai llm free, and some vibe coded slop to make it. I felt good. Used Gemini and Amp to make it.
- The meta-ai just stopped working the moment I created this page. I have to patch the library to make it work now.
Gemini Reverse Engineered Client
- Gemini is the only now that offers free limited chat without bot detection. At least as of 6th February 2026. It can change the moment I post something, such is the speed of shipping of people now.
Youtube Cookie session Exporter
- This is something I felt good building, atleast watching. I made it so that, I can copy a session from my un-authenticated profiles of browser and transfer it anywhere I want to browse feeds and take a different spin on it.
- I discovered that the expiry of these tokens is 6 months.

Read

I miss thinking hard
- Boy! That hits like truck. Absolutely relatable. We can share that part of our mind, it lives rent free on my mind. How to balance the builder and the thinker part of my brain.
- I also had feelings like actually typing the code gave me the time to think about it, but now the time between prolonged thinking is just squishing like thin line. Its getting too much building and no thinking or taking a step back.
- Maybe that is how we will move forward, but it doesn’t look sustainable. Developers will burn out and eventually give into AI slop. But here we are learning to deal with them at the moment, and it seems we need to find a way around and through them and not out of them.
The most important thing while working with LLMs
- This makes sense. Just like children, when you say something, they will go wild and try to interpret what you actually meant to do, they will circumvene around the instruction bt won’t quite follow your exact instruction. Its not controlling, its programming the model.
- The process of making it faster by breaking the steps into parallel is quite interesting. Not sure if everything can be done that way, we would spend so much time in thinking about how to break the problem which is half of the solving part.
My AI adoption journey by Mitchel Hashimoto
- That was a banger of a post. True and Honest.
- Chatbot interface was a good gateway drug to ai-assisted coding, but its not quite a good one, move on to agents with cli or tool access.
- Check if it can do what you can do, that is a good advice and pratical one. It gives you the taste of what can work and what cannot. I have done it myself for one of scripts to get metrics from logs, all of which I could do in half an hour, but with agents and right context, I can now do it in minutes. But that took some time to understand what to give it, and what to not.
- Keep an agent running, think about what you could be doing but can delegate. This is quite a good advice given how smart they can get given the right context and tools.
- Do the work, till the agent does its. Don’t delegate and chill. Forming skills is something still valuable as a human.

That is damn point

Well, you’re trading off: not forming skills for the tasks you’re delegating to the agent while continuing to form skills naturally in the tasks you continue to work on manually.

- Use agents.md, skills or whatever the harness can use best. Its a ongoing process but don’t get caught up for long in old ways.
- Always have an agent running (maybe just one). That is a bold advice. And this leaves me with disagreement for quite a subtle reason. It can feel like I am missing out on something if an agent is not running, seems like wasting precious time in making something, which is not a bad feeling to have, but can ruin the day.

Watched

Theo in Opus 4.5 with Skills: The best model for frontend design is...
- That was cool. I didn’t knew Gemini was that good without skills at frontend design. Need to actually try it out.
- Also its quite comical that a single md file can steer a atrocious model like opus 4.5 at design into a marvelous tasteful designer.
Theo on Codex: OpenAI just dropped their Cursor killer
- This is perfect for me, i have 5+ tabs of agents running on the terminal with cursor-agent cli. I crash the system very hard. This is really smart thinking.
- I thought of making terminal interface for the vibe coding a particular prompt into multiple models as worktrees. But this is taking into a different league.
ThePrimeagent on Moltbook failing
- Yeah! That was just a open database. Humans manipulated to make it look like llms did it. What a shame to be a human. Why do they need to make it act like agents did it, if they can’t then simply say so, and even if they can’t its not of any use.
Theo on Moltbook situation
- He was clearly hyped about it. It felt like sci-fi to me when I watched it. But the next day we say the crash, the reveal of the project.

Learnt

Skills/just markdown files can make LLMs better
- I saw this with Clawd bot or moltbot or openclaw or whatever you want to call it. The molthub or moltbook is based on just a single markdown file.
- This is just mind-boggling like reading a passage from scifi book. The transition to scifi from normal mundane human life was just a matter of a text file. Damm! That lasted for a day, but it was a good run.
Agentically using LLMs is the way to go
- I created something that increased the metrics by 15% and I was really happy, keeping the cost at bay and increasing the numbers which was like very hairy problem. That was with agentic coding.
- Love to see that how things will turn out in the future.
Cursor doesn’t count tokens used in the agent-cli in the analytics page
- I use agent-cli all the day, and I was in the bottom 10 of the organisation chart of cusor usage. I was like what the heck?
- Cursor cannot configure its analytics right, Its not just me you know. Only two people would get this line.
Sharepoint deletes links after 90 days of subscription cancellation
- Yes, this is subtle but very ridiculous from Microsoft. It makes sense, because then whats the point of the subscription if you can revive your files anytime, after years and months.

Tech News

OpenAI releases Codex agent management GUI
- This is something solid and I am looking for something similar to this from open source community.
Anthropic drops Claude 4.6
- Hhh? We were expecting Sonnet 5, but what a surprise drop from Anthropic. Did it not succeed at the evals or was it worse from the intended score?
OpenAI drops GPT 5.3
- Surprise. How can OpenAI have 0.3 versions. I have never seen 2.3, 3.3, 4.3 but a 5.3 very well, very well. Looks like the plateau of models is inevitable
Mistral releases Voxtral 2 transcribe
- Mistral struggling as always from the beginning.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#781st edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from this long, energizing week. Talking to people helps. Its not what we would do by automating, its a question is what can be automated and what should not be. AI is changing things fast and quick. Developers are at the forefront of it. Can’t be more blessed with a perfect time.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #79

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 UTC

Week #79

It was a tiring lazy week, honestly. I am not not-excited. I am excited, but it feels pointless. Like swimming in a pool where people are crowded. I don’t know what I am saying but building things has never been easier and the floor is open but the barrier to reach user is still the same.

This weekend I would like to complete some unfinished things vibe coded projects and put it out. I already have completed one, there is one in progress, the last one will complete and consolidate it as my thing and put in the web. I love these times.

Quote of the week

“The bigger the goal, the bigger the hurdles, you’ll be surrounded sure, but keep the fire flickering, you might die giving a hope for someone behind”

I think this is true. I have bigger dreams, ambitions, maybe bigger responsibilities. But that doesn’t give me an excuse to give up. Time and time again, I am shattered, broken and bamboozled with problems coming out from nowhere. I still keep on the hunt, I can still see the prey, I need to move one step at a time.

I think its arguably evident that the bigger the calling (call me religious or philosophical, but I believe it) the bigger the forces to stop you from doing it. It can be a deadly weapon, every weapon is two sided. Blessing can become a curse in a flick of thought. We need to understand the core idea of the decision and then track back to our intentions.

Created (Vibe Coded/AI-Assisted Coding)

CMS Finally working with Netlify Cloud Functions + Hugo
- I finally spent time to fix my link blog setup. I made sure the weekend it was smooth, frictionless as possible, and exportable in markdown.
- The post I add on CMS gets saved to DB, the cronjob on github action picks up the saved post in the past 6 hours and adds a file in the repo.
- This builds a fresh site every six hours at https://notes-meetgor-com.vercel.app/links/ which I’ll port to my own site at meetgor.com
- It was fun, I did it like a ralph loop with Amp Code. It was fast. I use Amp code just because its fast. Not necessarily smarter, but it has some edge on Gemini CLI for sure.

I would be vibing this weekend for making some products end to end. I have been inspired by some people at my org, leading from the front. I love to be in such a place and am blessed to be here. Would like to show and prove that I too want to see success.

Read

One Year with Kagi · Blog · Eli Perkins
- This is nice, a good insight actually.
  - Don’t outsource thinking by reading the AI overview from LLMs
  - Human curated lists are often good and better for your brain than AI slop
  - Search engines already have biases in them, by putting AI they are adding a new dimension to the biasness
- Kagi is something I have installed on my phone but didn’t quite use it. I think I am getting lazy and am taken away in the habit of reading the AI overview which is one click away.
- Need to rewire it back to good old days with Kagi it seems. But there is also a counter point of searching and getting information effectively maybe that is partially true if we are outsourcing our analytical thinking in searching and skimming by reading less articles.
Some notes on starting to use Django
- I wonder if django is like unintentionally made for LLMs
- It has everything suitable for context
  - great docs
  - 2 decades of stack overflow questions
  - robust and explicit
  - not exceptionally magical
- It just makes sense, its like a mechanical part of a system, others might hide complexity or maybe too verbose
- But django just hits the harness the right I think. I have read couple of articles on this and I think it makes sense.
- Though for now I favor golang instead of django why? type system. You can add pydantic or mypy in django but out of the box support is where I am inclined towards for now.
After two years of vibecoding, I’m back to writing by hand
- True, maybe. It feels it kind of trashes the way through the solution rather than path finding to a solution
- The image is so well presented, the idea hits home.
- Though I think only certain people are able to get value out of it, its a skill issue which eventually everyone will cope with in the end.
- Not sure how well good or bad it is, it seems to be fading out now.
AI coding agents for enterprises | Mistral AI
- This is finally something I have been waiting for.
- An agent free, to run. Remote agent.
- Claude Code, Codex, Opencode, require some paid tier.
- This looks like I can finally use one from my phone.
- Jules surely is there but its so buggy and just halts for no reason, not reliable enough. Might make my own agent.
Agentic Table Merging | Tensorlake
- This looks really interesting.
- Very close to the problems that I am solving. People are trying hard on agents and this I thought was far fetched, but maybe not. Agents are the way.
- We need to find the way through agents and not out of it.
AGENTS.md outperforms skills in vercel’s agent evals
- Passive context (AGENTS.md) currently outperforms active retrieval (skills)
- Skills are still useful for vertical, action-specific workflows
- I think I can say that LLMs are bad at reliably picking tools, skills, or docs. If the information is needed, make it always present rather than calling it separately. The best results for this eval came from removing choices, and ambiguity
Inside OpenAI’s in-house data agent
- Instead of requiring analysts to manually explore dozens of tables or write intricate SQL, the agent lets them ask plain-English questions and get high-quality, correct data insights in minutes instead of days.
Litestream writable VFS
- The big thing I learned is that SQLite can now pretend your database lives locally while secretly pulling just the tiny pieces it needs from object storage, on demand.
- That means apps can start instantly, even with huge databases, and only hydrate the data they want which is wild if you’re used to slow restores or heavy disks. Wow
- Instead of copying data to compute before you can do anything, you let compute skim data lazily and write back carefully. It’s a clever trick, bending old constraints without breaking SQLite’s mental model, Flyio cooks wired and quite intruiging stuff.

Watched

Laracast: I’m Done
- Laracast cut off 40% of the workforce, sad again AI in the hunt, after tailwind this is sad.
- They are producing more content but the way he thinks about code is changing.
- The important thing that hits me is Agentic Coding doesn’t drain mind. Is this true? I don’t think so. I feel like when I used to program, I thought about what to do, then plan it out, and actually writing the code would give me a buffer, a mental buffer to calm my mind from the actual cognition, it triggered a different part of my brain. But right now with agentic coding, the phase is too short, and it doens’t trigger different parts of the brain, I have to review code which I am learning to, but it feels like I am getting too much load on the thinking part without actually taking a detox from it. It might be just me but this I need to change.
- Maybe this was the next iteration of programming, no one knows, but a good thing to see people admit.
Which Programming language for AI
- I was wondering the same, but I read something like LLMs are good at typed languages. Its not quite true though it seems. Rust and C++ should be shining here, if that was the case.
- It actually depends on the ecosystem and the core principles of the language and not just the technical features of the language.

DHH: Why AI isn’t writing my code yet!
- Oh Yeah! Oh no! I thought it was LLMs don’t feel good to code, but the answer was awkward. He is previleged (earned not luck) with the luxury to be in a position where he can code with hand chisels, rest of us have to slog with LLMs to make our day job.
- Its a harsh reality, the writing code part is becoming a hobby rather than a job I think. The vibe-slop cleaner is more of a job now-a-days.
- I love problem solving but sometimes AI is too fast for me to walk, I can’t run all the time, I am not saying I am lazy, but writing was the perfect thing to spend my time thinking and tinkering, LLMs seems to take away that time and replace it with hollowness and existential threat.

Learnt

Elixir is a better programming language for LLMs to understand and reason with
- Its quite easy to read and understand, everything is immutable makes it hard to shot yourself on the foot
- C# is also a good contender, not just the language design, but more so due to community and documentation.
- I am coming to realize that having a great language is not a technical feat, but a mutual agreement between usage and depth. Like LLMs struggle with Rust too due to too verbose and cult like culture. Golang is not quite impressive as Elixir due to lack of proper documentation and tooling. Python is a sandbag, filled with good and bad examples on the internet.
Coding and Reviewing are like Writing and Reading, you need to do both
- Coding is a mechanical task, you can get away with it and feel good
- Reviewing on the other hand is not a straightforward approach, you might feel good, you might feel dejected, you may learn something, you may waste time, its quite a bag.
- You can’t keep doing one and expect things to change, you need to balance both.
- Just like reading and writing, you need to feel inspired after writing, or get your thoughts out after having a giant reading spree. Both are needed, don’t become a elitist in either of them, you can have taste in one of them, but don’t overlook the other.

Tech News

Moonshot AI releases Kimi K2.5
- The model seems good. I love the way it reads. I hate when GPTsque models give list after list. This model just reads like a breeze. But oh they have improved the coding side of it. Nice side quest.
Google DeepMind releases Genie
- This is quite a good thing from Google. They are starting to explore world models. Which could be a incremental steps after LLMs
GrokAI releases the API for Imagine
- This is a controversial feature, I don’t like the direction of Grok on that feature, it’s quite unchained and unguarded. Opposite of Anthropic, Its like a Slytherin vs Gryffindor. I am not liking when I say Anthropic is like Gryffindor but after Grok is doing I need to.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#780th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from this week, it was a slow week, had a long weekend, but looking forward for a new week and a new month. A perfect month.

Happy Coding :)

Leave a comment

Techstructive Weekly #78

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 UTC

Week #78

Some weeks are no for hoarding knowledge, I realize this after writing this edition. And this week is that one, the one that you need to put breaks and not reflect that’s done, but see the road ahead, not how far we have come, but where to go next. What to do next, why build something, why spent 2 years on something. Question, think, understand and let it settle. Everyone is doing that. Some aren’t privileged as I am, I am grateful for that.

I am going into the long 3 day weekend with a lot of projects to build, would be disappointing to not have at least one hack from the shed on Tuesday.

Quote of the week

“I carve things of wood because things made by effort are more real than things made by wishing.”
― Katherine Arden, The Girl in the Tower

Oh yes! This hits. I read the book last week and completed the trilogy yesterday. The quote hits home. Why? Just compare the hand crafted, effort rich written code with AI generated code. I guess I don’t have to speak anything more. The rest is on your own right? You can express you feelings about one or the other. It just is similar, but maybe incorrect. Code is a means to an end, just like some tools in our lives are. If I am a writer, laptop or a book is a means to an end, I can’t obsess one over other. I would use either whichever is at my disposal.

Effort and wishing would come in to play when you are doing it for your or others pleasure and to express something which wishing or words couldn’t.

Read

The recurring dream of replacing developers
1. what a flashback, everything makes sense.
2. Programming is not mechanical
3. yet people tried hard to make solve for it as it was mechanical
4. COBOL made syntax readable. CASE tools eliminated typing. Visual tools eliminated syntax. AI can now generate entire functions from descriptions
5. Each advancement addressed a real friction point. Yet the fundamental challenge persists because it’s not mechanical. It’s intellectual. Software development is thinking made tangible
6. Just sheer facts those two. We need to find a way around using AI not away from it.
The joy of being a competent beginner
1. This is really well put. Very relatable. We all have started with some quick competence at something in the beginning and then ignored or abandon after some familiarity of it.
2. This exactly lists why we do that, and the reason is that going beyond that beginner competence is a steep learning curve, initially you are fast but then quickly hit a wall.
3. Most of them give up, the ones that stick, are the ones that somewhat develop a mastery or sort of craftsmanship in the art.
Welcome to Gas Town
1. Agents as code generation orchestrators. This is quite a ambitious thing. I haven’t read the full post. But I can see where it goes.
2. I haven’t either been in situations with 10s of these agents ripping in the background. There are reasons for them and some of them I am trying to overcome.
  1. I don’t have that many ideas honestly, this is flawed in my opinion, my biggest weakness maybe.
  2. I don’t have claude code as I don’t have much to spend on AI. I am limited by free options and some work related subscriptions. I am bogged down by the clumsy free models.
  3. The habit of abandoning a project after the setup is too evasive now. The earlier habit has just got more notorious with AI.
3. That all said, I love this idea, the next step in AI is agents orchestration. Maybe I am behind it, but I had a few ideas, not exactly this but some level of parallel agents running. Not orchestrating. Maybe that idea is speaking more than ever. I thought someone solved it, but nope. Need to roll up the sleeves.
The bet on juniors just got better
1. This is fair. The bet on junior aka me was that I will take the ownership. And this previous year I did. They might have gotten the payback but not quite like AI. The thing that AI might miss is reliability. Not availability.
2. If something goes wrong, I can wake up and roll in. But if some non-informed developer or AI does it, there it could get into a different rabbit hole.
3. I think the more quickly you can show your eagerness to solve problem, actual user problems the better the bet payoff would be. Its not rocket science but is easier said than done.
The challenges of soft delete
1. Nice read. I had experienced it in my first internship. This problem of dead objects. Especially if you are using Django and Postgres. It looked easy to add a field of soft deletion. But the resulting queries could create bottlenecks.
2. Since then I haven’t quite gotten the chance to explore this, this article showed me the different ways to implement the soft deletion.
The toil of blog art
1. Yes, the art of expressing some concept is valuable. AI might have eased it, but true human-eque art is impossible to replicate. The chef’s kiss is what the author is trying to meld in the post about.
Writing first tooling second
1. True, gold. This is to the point and another way of saying, “Show, don’t tell”, so “Write, don’t setup”
2. The blog is merely one possible organising principle, not a requirement.
3. I started the same way. I picked up hashnode, then moved to jekyll and github pages, then used python via markata (waylon walker’s ssg), an ssg that someone else wrote and I loved it, it was what I needed, the control of what goes in and out and also it was easy to see what was happening so that I can change and remove what I wanted.
4. I finally now am rolling my own SSG in Golang and a CMS system. I am not very consistent in sticking to one cms, I have built 3-4 versions of them. But the thing is I still post consistently. Not long form posts, but these reflective posts and short bursts of thinking.
5. Write your brain out first, then eventually it will outgrow to your needs, the system will be formed not shoved in. Like earlier I just used to write long form how-to-guides or tutorials, then I started to write reflections weekly, then link posts tils and suddenly I had 10 types of posts. Article, Tutorials, TILs, Thoughts, Link-blog, Newsletter, Notes, and what not.
Why talking to LLMs have improved my thinking
1. I like the take here. The one aspect of it only.

Writing has always done this for me. What is different is the speed

- That sentence just changed my perspective on LLMs. I was skeptical but now, since they have gotten the powers of thinking, tool calling, I think they are good at talking out ideas and forming maps of different features.
Nested code fences in Markdown
1. This is clever. Never knew this.
2. I think this clears the rule of when to escape the backticks and the fenced code block within one. Really nice to know this. Helps in writing as well as developing a SSG.

Watched

Amp Inc. Raising Agents: Episode 9
- Writing code by hand is over?
  - There will be things where you will have to write the code, but like assembly
  - it can just do things, like give me a cake
    - It doesn’t need the recipe, or hand holding of each task, it can just do it
    - Taste it even and then check if its burned or not, it has a taste or evaluation thing as well
    - It can think about things
  - You need to make the codebase ready for agentic ready
    - It needs harness for testing, good documentation, edge cases, actual problem it solves
Claude Cowork: AGI is here, hheh?
- I loved the video. It showed the flaws and the possibilities of this tool. I think its a step in the AGI, but good or bad, the people will decide.
- The edit button on twitter, that had me rolling out loud. It was a human-esque reply though. “I can see the edit button therefore I am logged in as ABC person” True. Good thinking Claude. Hope you continue in a limited set of thinking.
Claude Cowork
- Again, I was tempted to learn how different people perceive this tool. I never watched her videos. But this video came to me at random and I thought of watching it, it was fun.
- It also showed a good starting point and a legit use cases for people to curse themselves a little less with such tools.
- Developers can do it with writing scripts but laymen can’t oooohhh. This tool should just do that.
We need to talk about Ralp loops
- It kind of is hillarious of how this works! I am not able to wrap my head around it. Like why and how
- What kind of ... Writing it immediately hit me. I do the same thing that Ralph loop does with AMP code free tier.
- The context size is limited, so I have to be wary of the limit, I keep the summary of the thread once the limit is reached and continue a new thread. Wow. Writing actually makes things visible and find the hidden patterns. Gold!
- Watching this video now makes sense. It just a loop for agent to start from where it left off without bloating the context. Superb.
Its time to change your database - from Supabase to Convex

- Oh! The convex database now makes me in awe. It never clicked and all of a sudden it rings bells and whistles. The schema changes the database, that is wild.
- I can see myself using it for my favorite language. GO!
- Its statically typed, so I can catch bugs before hitting them on the database.

Learnt

We are in a time of both awe and suspicion
- I am in awe that I have a tool that can do a lot of things, on the other hand I am kind of having existential crisis on what my job might ask me?
- Like I don’t have anything to add in learning section, I am just figuring things out to learn. I guess some weeks you can’t force yourself to learn technical things, its ok and even necessary to let go of not hoarding knowledge or information (like I learn how to do x in y, etc)
- Some weeks are for converting the knowledge and connecting them to form insights and developing a intuition for the ultimate wisdom. This is that week for me it seems.
- I honestly say, I didn’t read a lot of code, atleast not something out of which I knew. I fixed bugs, yes, wrote code, maybe, but generated code, hell yes.

Tech News

ChatGPT users to have targeted Ads
- Its happening. The inevitable.
Anthropic release Claude’s New Constitution
- I want to read it, will surely read it. But I am tempted to watch theos video first. Will detail read it over the weekend. Looks something is spicy brewing in the AI mind.
Winapp from Windows for making windows application
- Kiind of wild and wired. Who makes them like that? I thought it was like a Microsoft Copilot slop for AI Agent. Thank gosh it was not that.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#779th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from this long slow slog week. The weekend in India is long. So will be taking some time to invest in learning and building some slop from LLMs. Maybe will build a better intuition for working with LLMs, I know its not a one day process, but I have spent some months in it and continue to do so. See you next week!

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #77

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 00:00:00 UTC

Week #77

It was a harsh week. Not the roughest yet tiny exhilarating with new hopes. It happens, to get the best of me, things will come towards me with force. I am welcome to those challenges and hurdles.

I am in awe and inspired to build things, I went off track last week. The previous week I was pumped with two side project in a day, yet slumped then. This week would like to build that momentum back.

Quote of the week

“You need to control the mind. Thoughts will tempt, but you decide to act or let it go”

I must practise it heavily. Working remotely is tiring in a different way. Sometimes you just have no one to talk to, no one to understand your mindset. I get caught in overthinking and contemplating and procrastination. I need to divert myself to other things, its not like I don’t work. I just cannot resist AI to delegate the work and let me read more articles and watch tutorials and videos. It hard to control the mind, but I think its more important in being aware of it.

Read

Don’t Fall into the AI hype
- This is interesting and it comes at the right time

facts are facts, and AI is going to change programming forever It does not matter if this or the other CEO of some unicorn is telling you something that is off putting, or absurd. Programming changed forever, anyway. What is the social solution, then? Innovation can’t be taken back after all. I believe we should vote for governments that recognize what is happening, and are willing to support those who will remain jobless. And, the more people get fired, the more political pressure there will be to vote for those who will guarantee a certain degree of protection. But I also look forward to the good AI could bring: new progress in science, that could help lower the suffering of the human condition, which is not always happy.

- All points and counterpoints are well addressed here. Innovation can’t be taken back, that just hits hard. Harsh reality even. AI is in the wild, you can’t avoid it, you’ll have to capture and understand them, just like pokemons. Its hard at first, but never say never. I learnt the hard way, kept giving AI things, tried different things, modes and models, and found the mindset shift. I found what I cared the most, but also a part of me felt taken away.
A typical PDF document
- This is cool, I’ve read a lot of these and working at docsumo, makes me want to read about them more.
Ideas are cheap, Execution is cheaper
- Oh, my god. This is a bitter truth. Geez.
- Never thought about it. Really its kind of true now. It just is a quick change.
- The mindset shift is critical.
A Letter for those who fired Tech Writers because of AI
- True empathy is key Liability, everything becomes liability if outsourced.
- LLMs don’t have the taste, the care feeling of the users, the developers yet.

I read a few other posts, but haven’t gotten a chance to sit on it. Will roll a blog for such link post, vibe coded yes! Ideas are cheaper, executive is cheaper now! Hell yes.

Watch

Kubernetes Zero to Hero Course: Alta3 Research
- This, is a masterpiece. I learnt everything. Like atleast touched on everything. Loved it.
- Want to get into it, need to leverage it and play with it.
- It clicks to me now, the autoscaling, security, the volume bit wow. Everything makes sense after using them and taking them for granted due to cloud run abstraction.
2026 Standup Predictions by Teej, Primeagen, Caesy, Trash
- Pure entertainment. Great insights.
- AI coded bug yep, that is happening and people won’t notice until a month, bold one.
AI Assisted Coding
- Cool advice. Need to improve on clarity, delegation and orchestration. That is a pillar in system thinking I believe.

Learnt

Cursor doesn’t count the tabs,code,diff s if not done via their UI
- Kind of frustrating to see myself down the chart for the usage in organisation. I use it heavily. Yet I am looked as AI skeptic.
- Frustrating to see their own analytics not getting into account. The acceptance is rubbish, you should not measure acceptance just measure the generation bit. No one will let the code be unused right?
Kubernetes Fundamentals
- It has three components, Kube API, scheduler and worker
- The pods and kubelet and all are confusing yet good explained with hierarchy.
- The kube api gets the manifest and delegates to the scheduler and other parts to spinup and manage resources.

Tech News

Anthropic launches Claude Cowork
- This is like a first step in laying the ground work for unemployment. Yeah really. Look at it. It can do a lot of things. Menial things that got humans paid for.
- It might create panic in industries. A good product but quite threatening and unbelievable.
- We saw it coming, but its too soon. We are in the start of 2026 and the wave hasn’t yet subsided.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#778th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Leave a comment

Share Techstructive Weekly

Techstructive Weekly #76

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 UTC

Week #76

It was a good start to the year, finally doing something that I had struggled to do for the past year or so. AI Assisted Programming. Yeah! That was something I finally somewhat understand, and can do it without feeling a slightest of grudge or emotional drama. It took a while to realize it, but here we are. 2026!

I don’t know how I feel right now. Its quite a good times to be in tech.

Quote of the week

“If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
— Sirius Black
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

This is true. I think we should treat people with kindness irrespective of their position. Position is no match for one’s love and care for us. They might be doing with their own purpose and needs but they still show it.

Created

World Atlas Game
- This is vibe coded in a day. Gemini CLI and Amp. Just ripped it
- I read Golang was good to work with AI Agents, thought of building some backend with it and lo behold, it did one shot it almost. For the frontend I choose Vue. Surprisingly its a great UI. I am honestly impressed. I didn’t write a single line of code, let even see.
- I always wanted to make this, but was very lazy to do all of the meddling with the boilerplatey code, it just did in a few minutes.
CMS with ssg
- Yes, this was something I have built twice or thrice, it was another shot. I wanted a blog that can just save to the sqlite db and fetch aas cronjob every 6 hours to build the site with ssg. I just gave it and it did. Its not great, it has still qwirks, but making it better over time.

Read

Dialogue between a developer and a kid
1. This is hilariously funny.
2. What a real developer is? Who knows languages? No, who knows how to code, No! A developer is someone who sticks to a problem when everyone has given up.
3. This conversation feels like me and my friend. My friend is the reason I am here today. He knew programming well. I was inspired from him, he gave me advice to learn one programming language, I was boasting about python, C and C++. I feel like a kid here. That was 7 years ago, time flies by.
Fear is not advocacy
1. This is real advice. People are hyping about the next workflow to 100x our productivity. Its ok to be 1x and still push less bugs than 100x and push 1000 bugs.
Quick and dirty print debuggin in Go
1. This is cool, we make logging a mess. For logs we need to have separate scripts to get relevant data. How much chaos it can be.
AI Did Not Take Your Agency. You Handed It Over
1. True. LLMs amplify ambguity.
2. If LLMs don’t have agency, they don’t choose constraints. Well put.
On not using Django
1. I don’t quite get it. Maybe its true. Django provided a good start but then it was like a lock in.
2. With LLMs its quite easy to generate the boilerplatey code that django provides out of the box, so that demand is lost?
3. Its not the only reason django is here right? It has extensions, best python community and even more best documentation.
4. I think it will be the best framework to build with LLMs in the future if the ecosystem continues to improve
6’7’‘ is not Random
1. This is so true

In the 1990s, a “middle-class job” was enough to buy a house. Being “6 feet” was enough to be tall.
In the 2020s, the middle has been hollowed out.
To be “wealthy” now requires a crypto-exit or a tech IPO (The Economic 6’7”).
To be “famous” requires global virality (The Social 6’7”).
To be “attractive” requires filters and surgery (The Aesthetic 6’7”).

AI should be free software
1. Yikes, this looks like a good take on LLMs being free and open weight.
2. If not, the larger AI labs might offer ads into the LLM suggestions. This, just the thought of it makes me wiggle with fear. It might push us in wired directions.
3. The point of drawing a line of “our goal” vs “model’s goal” becomes hazy and it just doesn’t align with human values.
4. Its a pretty hard problem to solve if it goes in a bad direction, which it seems to be at the moment.

I just completed reading Harry Potter #4 the Goblet of Fire. It was amazing. A good start to 2026 in reading. Hoping to complete the series in February.

Watched

Designing Data Intensive Applications: Chapter 1 and 2
- It was a great overview of the database systems. I like how he explains the p50, p90, and all metrics. It makes sense without getting into too much of details
- Also the diagram of the OLAP and OLTP databases and how it fits. It made sense.

AI codes better than me, now what?
- This is really changing. It can write code, better than me. That’s when I started to use it as a partner that knows a lot of things but gets overwhelmed and like a junior does a lot of things.
- Guiding it, reviewing it, and also understanding myself what it actually does is co critical.

Database Internals:Chapter 1
- The difference of the OLAP and OLTP database is so nice.
- Also the differnce of column based vs row based database type is clear from this. Makes sense and intuitive as well
- The Binary tree also makes sense.

The year I stopped writing code
- This is interesting and eye opening. It actually gave me the reason to be active while working with LLMs.
- Reviewing is hard, most developers avoid it, that’s the part you need to be doing, in order to be a better one. That point I had ignored and it has came to haunt me in the year throughout. This new year though, will be different. I have decided to take LLM generated code with a grain of salt.

Learnt

How to ship code with Cursor
1. I explained my euphoric moments in the week where I discovered the debug and ask mode in Cursor. It helps me to understand the problem, learn something. Which agent modes doesn’t let me.
2. I can pause and let it show me what is happening, I can read and share with it, what I think and have a conversation and not just make change all the time. The switching mode was liberating, I think these models should know when to ask and when to execute.
Read csv from Pandas in python needs quoted string for multiple commas
1. If you have n headers and have n+m commas in the row, pandas’ read csv function will break
2. Because there is ambiguity in which comma is the header separator and which is the actual text comma.
3. Use quoted string for the text if it contains comma.

Tech News

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#777th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it, a good start to the year, looking forward to a good and great year 2026, will it be slow? Probably not, but the year seemed to start slow. Looks good for now, we already have a lot of things already to unpack from the last year advancement. 2025 was pivotal for anyone in tech, 2026 onwards it looks like a year to build and carry that momentum.

Leave a comment

Share Techstructive Weekly

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Techstructive Weekly #75

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:00:00 UTC

Week #75

Oh the middle of end of 2025, and the beginning of 2026. This is a wired post. I let myself back, reflected more. I know it was a fast paced year for software development. People are here to prove it. I just laid it out straight that its never been valuable to be a human, a distinct, natural and earnest human.

I must say I completed a non-technical goal of 2025, I have my novel’s first draft in my hands(in my google drive). Its very rough, I want to revise it, I want to remove the fluff, but it is there in its entirety. 33 Chapters, 85K words. 45 days of writing span across 6 months, I did it. I am pumped to revise and write the next novel. The hunger to write has never been higher for me.

Quote of the week

“Grit is never bad, grit with wrong intent, for wrong purpose is definitely bad”

I had a grit to write a story, I will write it. It was a grit, not a goal. I had goals for it for the past 4 years, yet when I made it a grit, here it is, I am on top of it. If a grit was something to think bad of someone, or look down on someone with grudge, it is a bad thing. A wrong grit is something born out of desires, rage, frustration, anger or even jealously, None of it could be bad per see. But if the intention of those desires, rage, jealously is for ill of someone then it could be bad, not if it is born to uplift yourself from the ground, after having thumped by life.

Sometimes, grit is something life give us, throws at you, you need to learn to handle it. It can’t be thought, it needs to experienced. You have to fail, you have to struggle. But here for me, the struggle, the resistance to write finally bent its knee against my grit (not boasting, nor arrogant). Just fierce grit born out of the desire to be a better person, to give back to a human, to say a kind thank you.

Wrote

2025 Year Review
- Feels good to write this posts. I never miss them! I write less post this year. Just 2 or 3, but I have written a lot of SQL like learning log posts (53 of those).
- Not to forger I am also writing my thoughts on the things I learn and read here. So 52 articles for each week. Easily making up 100 writing pieces.

I completed Advent of SQL with 15 posts too, here are the remaining, which I completed on the weekend. I learnt a lot, it was a good one, the problems ramping up gradually, then the lore for each post was so good.

Read

The future of software development is software developers

technical practices that can dramatically shrink delivery lead times while improving reliability and reducing the cost of change, with or without “AI”

- A banger of a post. This is expressing that AI is just a shift in a toolset, or maybe even a abstraction of the language. We will still have ambiguity that a human needs to understand in order to deliver a software.
- We can see from his experience, developers were written obsolete from time to time, and each time it was different, more potent than the other, but here we are.

On top of all that, “AI” coding assistants are really nothing like the compilers and code generators of previous cycles. The exact same prompt is very unlikely to produce the exact same computer program. And the code that gets generated is pretty much guaranteed to have issues that a real programmer will need to be able to recognise and address

- This is true too, we are just automating and generating crap faster, code is always crap until distilled and refine with each iteration to the needs. We just now have a better or worse iteration cycle, a machine that can spit out code like tirelessly, we need to vet and test it.
2025, The year in LLMs: Simon Willison Weblog
- Boy! That is a lot! I have been saying “overwhelming” word was not sufficient to describe this tend of LLMs in 2025. This explains the reason
- We had LLAMA falling, Gemini gripping, OpenAI still on the top yet cornered neck to neck suddenly with Chinese Labs and Anthropic in its own league. We saw the sudden rise and sudden dip in vibe coding, people thought “We can be programmers! We don’t need developers anymore, hehe” to “Damm! Do I need a developer to debug this?”. That was a funny thing to watch (as a developer)
- The images and 6 second video clip generated by AI are mind boggling, we saw from Sora and Nano Banana what havoc they can wreck if put in untamed hands.
- Local models are getting good, but the speed of the cloud and advancement over the other side is rocketing. There is also this trend of cli based agents. Claude code just set the trend and let 100s of cli agents rip off in the months to follow. Those are still released by new companies every now and then.
- Slop, yeah! We had less human slop than we needed AI right?
- Thanks to Simon Sir for this awesome blog. It finally gives me a relief to read so many thing have happened at a glance
Andrej Karapathy’s 2025 LLM Year in Review
- This was more of a reflection post, of how his mental model has changed and how things are building up. I like it. It was a interesting and highly technical perspective.
- His opinion of LLMs as Ghost is so liberating, as it actually threatens me from my identity if we compare it with humans. Ghost makes sense, even dismissive it as a slave sort of relation right? Not in a bad way but kind of inferior relation for LLMs with humans.
- Agent that lives in the terminal is practical, for a developer or a human who understands what they are doing, they know what they want, its just too much menial for them to spend the energy on. I agree.
- There is a lot of work to be done, developers, don’t strap your belts, hone your hammers, its going to be needed.
- Also his post:

Andrej Karpathy@karpathy

I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become

5:36 PM · Dec 26, 2025 · 15.9M Views

2.58K Replies · 7.24K Reposts · 54.5K Likes

- Could this have been more accurate! Right note to end the year.
- Vibe coding last year, now this is the trend we are surfing on, this will last decades.
Local LLMs are how nerds justify a big computer they don’t need
- Curiosity gets the better of them. I have a 8GB device, I can barely run a 1B parameter model. I get frustrated but have nothing to complain. I can use ChatGPT in temporory mode, or incognito mode if I don’t want it to attach it to the memory. I don’t see using local models on scale is justifiable just yet.
You are not dumb, you just lack the pre-requisites
- Yeah! I have started to learn SQLite and since 2 years made a Brilliant org streak. I feel good taking on advanced concepts soon.
- Basic and a good foundation helps you pivot and branch off to wide possibilities.
13 Tips for Writing a technical book
- A handy little thing to remind myself, this is inevitable for me. I would write one. Not this year probably. But I would surely write one, my gut, my instinct is not false on this.
- I would this then. Great advice for just being curious.
Shipping at inference speed
- This is a good post to say that we have different ways of using LLMs at this point and nothing is permanent. Every month or weeks, this is changing. Adopting a new workflow is like juggling circus art.
- Codex is something I haven’t even touched, Claude code too, never. I have used Amp, Gemini CLI, Warp and Cursor the most.
- I love those, those are cheap or even free, they help me understand what I was about to do wrong. They have never produced anything right 100%. I always needed to understand what was I supposed to do.
- Is this true “>The important decisions these days are language/ecosystem and dependencies” Maybe but I don’t see that. Its kind of true, but not in a big way. The major things are the flow, the edge cases and the intuition for the problem for it to be ale to understand.
- This actually surprised me”> Go wasn’t something I gave even the slightest thought even a few months ago, but eventually I played around and found that agents are really great at writing it, and its simple type system makes linting fast.” I want to try it now. I have ton of go projects.
The internet is a net negative

We’ve maximized information and accidentally drowned wisdom

- Hits home. This is good observation and a perfect critique, not over cynical, nor too loathed. Its just helplessness to avoid the battle of the mind and the heart.
- The business of the world has forced humans itself into a trap. What an irony we live in, creating a cage for ourselves. Besides slaughtering nature into it too.

All that time, that irreplaceable human attention, fed into machines that convert consciousness into quarterly earnings.

- That hurts badly. We are loosing are attention to these machines. We need to get it back. The time, the wisdom and the boring tone to our lives.

The optimist in me is still here. Still hoping.

- This is great piece of writing. I love it. Want to write essays like this.
- Thanks for writing this Kenneth, you have inspired some spark for me.
What I learned writing Gleam, after coming from Python
- Top to down approach. This just shifts from taking the problem and boiling it down to the input and output. Wow! This just made so much sense now.
- We can define the main API as the function that takes something and returns something. In between the intermediate steps, we can then decide what each component of the result will come from.
- I need to try hard on learning functional programming this year.
Engineering is becoming bee-keeping
1. I like this comparison quite a lot. Swarming agents is what its happening. And the realisation that code was the thing that doesn’t matter, the thing that matters is did we solve the problem

Honey shows up at the end. That’s what matters.

And bees can sting. Without the right gear and practices, you get hurt. The protective suit, the smoker, the careful movements. In code, that’s patterns, documentation, tests. The guardrails that keep the stings to a minimum.

Working like this is exciting. There’s a playfulness to it. You can try things without committing. You can explore without sunk costs weighing you down. You can work on three features at once because you’re not holding all the context in your head anymore.

You cannot not lead
- This is so subtle, yet perfect. You lead by good or a bad way.
- You cannot say I was not the leader when you are the only person building and maintaining it. You lead by examples, good or bad.
- Average sucks you know? You are either good or extremely bad. You cannot not lead.
- Wow! This post is so perfect, not only fits the manager but also every human, a elder human trying to teach or lead a younger one. The younger one learns from the examples and behavior of the leader.
Git Integrations is ten years away
- This is hillariously funny. I can’t imagine VS Code team coping up with git integrations in 2025
- I don’t blame them entirely, at least they realize it is missing. With these LLM assisted coding, they decided to ship it finally. We have one instance of AI assisted coding helping VS Code ship faster (after 10 years).
- Learn Git, true. I alway 100% of the times use the cli. NO aliases, no agents, just CLI commands. git add, commit -m, push, pull, merge, rebase whatever. If I don’t know, I google it, read the ai overview and straight to the keyboards.

Watched

CMU Databse System #3 Database Storage: Files, Storage, Tuples
1. This was a good lecture on the different storage hierarchy of the storage. The top there is the pages, the blocks of memory that database fetches for individual records or tuples. Then there is the blocks of memory on the databse file itself, and the actual disk of storage.
CMU Database System #4 Memory Management and Buffer pools
1. Ok OS is not our friend, we need to manage our memory ourselves. This went wild, I thought managing memory was like shooting yourselves on the foot, but not for DBs.
2. So we load the database file, from the disk into memory not as full, but chunks called frames, where each page is contained in the buffer pool. Interesting, this is done in the actual ram or the memory not full at once.
3. So this makes it the different algorithms to decide which frames/pages to keep and evict (remove)
4. There is a difference in lock and latches, a lock is something that protect the database logical content from other transactions i.e. the data to write or avoid corrupted reading
5. However a latch is something that helps in preventing the database internals from other operations, its only for an operation not a query. Its like a mutex.
6. We can’t rely on OS, as OS doesn’t know what are we querying.
7. There are like half a dozen implementation of replacement caches like LRU, Clock, LFU, LRU-K, ARC, etc.
How I parsed billions of rows for every user in 2 seconds
1. Wow! I like these videos. I learnt a lot too. It was passive knowledge true. But I came to know that these things are at least possible.
2. Clickhouse as a database, the queries, we can use Material views which can be used as a CTE almost but on the fly, Endpoints to query them as a URL. WOW!
3. The optimisation was based on the clickhouse features only, not sure if it would have been possible without it.

Learnt

SQL Recursive CTEs
1. We can define a recursive CTE by referencing the CTE within it
2. We have a single row (could be multiple as well) as the base case
3. Then we define the recursive part, by referencing the cte as the table we are fetching the records from with the data queried to it as the parameter.
4. Used it to solve Day 14
FTS in SQLite (Full text search)
1. I learnt how to write a query for FTS and construct like a index for searching across tables.
2. This is efficient from the string comparison as we don’t have to define how to look it up, we just define what we want. The algorithm and the query planner does it efficiently for us without storing it separately on disk.
Golang might just be better than python for writing LLM generated code
1. Its simple has a type system. So it makes it easier for LLMs to generate valid code with correct checks in place.
2. I need to experiment it with to understand the nuance this has.

Tech News

Leave a comment

Share Techstructive Weekly

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Well! That was a thumping start to the year 2026. I have bright ideas and a new canvas to paint. Looking forward to have things running and working in my favor over this year. After a slog and slump for 2 years, its time for me for redemption. I can see a hope, hopefully you can too. If not, you will soon.

Happy New Year!

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #74

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #74

It was winding down week, 2025, ending slowly, the biggest irony. The year was full of fast-paced, unprecedented models just dropping here and there. It was hard to keep up with the progress. It was getting overwhelming, no one is used to such a level of information. I was dreading with so much power in our hands. I couldn’t handle it and refrained it and thought it was better to focus on learning new things. I kept using AI tools at work, not by choice, but initially through force but then through necessity.

People made developers go fast, but they realised,

Churning code was never the bottleneck
Solving problems and understanding the business needs was the core goal.

Yet, people thought and here we are with tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and 10 other CLI tools. I learnt the hard way to leverage this tools, to use only when the code was throw away, some scripts, and getting insights from logs. But never on actual bugs and features, it was draining, lacked the joy I get from actually making it.

So, at the end of 2025, I am a decent developer who cannot use AI tools. Yes! give or take, I would love to learn more in 2026.

Quote of the week

“I don’t fear a future with AI. I fear a present without thinking.”

Yes! That is what I believe in this year. I have stopped thinking it seems. If in 2026, we move very fast without thinking, I need to change for the better. The directions we take, everything is a decision, but on what ground, on what thought. If the thought are not 90% yours, you are not thinking enough.

Think, don’t let AI do it.

Created

Advent of SQL 2025 in SQLite

Read

You’re not burning out, you’re essentially starving
- This was a good one
When you truly chase your highest potential, everything you thought was burnout will melt away. Because you weren’t suffering from too much work, you were suffering from too little truly important work. Like a boy who thought he was full until dessert arrives, you’ll suddenly find your hunger return!
Some really good points
Pause once a month to make sure you’re still on the right track. Stop once a year to triple-check you’re on the right track. But never get off this path towards your highest potential. Anything else will starve you existentially
This is true
We’re optimizing for less suffering instead of more meaning.
Yes
I woke up today so excited to get to work thinking it was Monday morning already. Instead of jumping right into it, I spent all morning making breakfast and playing with my kids, then wrote this post. When I’m writing about something personal, 1,000+ words can easily flow for me in an afternoon.
Just read the post!
Don’t become the machine
1. This is well put.
2. I kind of hate this argument.
3. Why are we comparing ourselves to machines in the first place? We can grind, but with thinking what actually we are doing.
4. Because I equate grind to consistency, it sometimes feels like grind, and we need to overcome that emotion of letting it overtake us. But most of the days, the grind is a joy, we do it because we feel like doing it.
How I left youtube
1. Man that was a good read!
2. I resonated with this a lot
  This duality is exhausting. It forces you to lie by omission to people you respect. You can’t tell your team, “I can’t take that ticket because I need to study dynamic programming.” You just have to work faster.
  I respect people above and behind me, but I too needed to move in life, support the things I was responsible for, get out of the grave situation I was pushed into. For that, I took some decisions, which I tried for, but nothing came off it, I wasn’t quite sure about the switch and left it when the offer came. Stranded here. I am feeling good here, but if I am not in another company by the end of 2026, something is wrong with me.
  Let’s see!
3. Good lessons
  - Don’t say: “I tweaked the YouTube watch-time algorithm using X variable.
  ”
  - Do say: “I optimized a high-throughput distributed system to prioritize user retention metrics, reducing latency by 150ms through a custom caching layer.”
  Man!!
  My final conversation with my manager was heart-wrenching. I had prepared a script, anticipating a counter-offer or a guilt trip. Instead, I was met with soft and understanding empathy.
  Yep
  The interview fatigue is real, and the conversations are hard, but the clarity you gain on your own value is worth the struggle.
4. Got to go through it once and then there would be no stop for growth.
  Grass looks green on the other side always! Damm
Text editors should be worse
1. Ok! I agree and disagree. You need to have a zen mode in your editor, which just is bare bones, and one for full fledged stuff like LSP, AI-auto-complete, syntax highlighting and what not.
2. Editor is just a tool, it can’t code on its own(in 2025, still needs prompting), similarly to use it, it needs preferences.
Structured output can create fake confidence
1. Spicy take and true! Somewhat true
2. If your task is complex to get things out from image, or understand the context, it might hinder the quality.
3. But if your task is to simply do something straightforward tool calls, structured output beats everything.
Writing HTML by hand is easier and cheaper then debugging your SSG in 2025
1. Wow! We are moving at a pace where generating html from LLM is getting easier (not cheaper yet!) than generating it by code, whew! What a time to be in.
Guide to Local LLM Models
1. Ok, the VRAM and RAM is somethign is quite critical. If you have less RAM and much VRAM, its no use, you need to have sufficient RAM in order to run a good enough model, VRAM wouldn’t handle it.
13 Years of Rust and the birth of Rue
1. I see this a lot! People creating something that they wanted but didn’t had the mental energy for.
2. I see it as draining rather. I can’t watch it write code for me, its a dreading feeling to be in for larger durations.
Vibe Coding is broring
1. It is pathetic, really. Watching it clog some code and done. Sigh what is left out then, to read code? Who loves it.
2. Vibe coding is cool and good if you just want the product in your hands, but if you care about the craft then please write it.

Watched

Bublesort is useful
1. Yes, this is kind of nuts
2. Buble sort is the lowkey high value thing to learn and know of.
3. VIsualizing any sorting algorithm really makes you understand the flow better and it clicks almost everytime.
The Fundamentals by Kelsey Hightower
1. Ahh! How many people will say this, but yet we can’t follow it
2. Everything boils down to the fundamentals, having the basic thing to understand when something goes wrong. Rather we make it complex in order to be percieved as smart and even oversmart.
Will Turso be the better SQLite? Interview with Glauber Costa
1. This was a great interview. I love the mentality.
2. If software built with community in the Linux community can sustain after almost 3 decades, then why can’t a embedded database like SQLite can?
3. Turso is Linux Community but for SQLite (minus the toxic leadership)
4. Pekka is a great, humble and smart leader to be leading the Turso, SQLite rewrite in Rust.
5. I want to contribute to SQLite, but it feels I don’t know enough everytime I touch it, also I started learning SQL for this. I have gone so far and now there is no way I am turning back.
6. I had one itch for geospatial exploration in SQLite for Mumbai city. This weekend might be the time to do it, maybe next year.

Learnt

Using Tool calling in Google Gemini API
- We can pass the tool as Code Execution block and it can essentially work as an agent in the api. This is a superpower to have.
- Can imagine people creating workflows and all sorts of things with the api in gemini, and gemini, kid you not is a really good model, like it can just do things. (Not complex things, but simple things, it can do really well)
I played with Grok Imagine
- Oh boy! These image and video models are getting really out of hands. I just uploaded my photo and boy came a introduction about me, like a one sentence greeting, but it was scary that it can do that, that quickly.
- I underistimated how quickly these models will evolve, we might plateau out eventually, but still the progress made is mind boggling.

Tech News

Well its Christmas and end of year.

God! Dam! This AI labs have learned something from last year. We don’t have groundbreaking models now! 2025 was a rollercoaster.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#775th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

But here’s my wrap in 2025

Wrote 52 articles from #23 all the way to #74
Wrote 50+ articles on SQL on #sqlog
Learnt about SQLite and solved 15 advent of sql #advent-of-sql-2025

All in all around 120 posts on my blog #blog

See you next year!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

(oh before that, there will be a 2025-yearly-review post)

Happy Coding!

Leave a comment

Share Techstructive Weekly

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Techstructive Weekly #73

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:00:00 UTC

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

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.
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.
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.
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.
The strange case of engineers who dismiss AI

Programming is a task; software engineering is a role

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.

- Wow! What a statement. Just bangers.
- 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).
- I think I bet on it, use it to ship more.

Wrote

Advent of SQL 2025 on databaseschool.com
- 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.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#775th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

See you next week!

Happy Coding

Leave a comment

Share Techstructive Weekly

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Techstructive Weekly #72

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #72

A good productive week (I am not sure, I am saying that in the last month of 2025). I would be writing a yearly review in a couple of weeks and this week might lift my spirits up. I was fresh, given time off from work, not really, but given the time to experiment.

I read a lot, fiction, technical, even philosophical, and random Hacker News articles. I read 2 books of Harry Potter. I haven’t read Harry Potter, I have watched the first 3 movies, but not books. I enjoyed it, it was subtly different from movies, I missed the quote “What an Idiot” from the movies, it was not in the book, i was disappointed but the atmospheric adventures was amazing read.

I even played with golang after a while, I streamed after ages. I felt back. I might be making much more comebacks. Have lot of ideas for projects, I know how to deal with such situations, now, do one thing. Don’t get into a trap of overthinking and porcastinating and delaying for prefection traps. Just start one project or one improvement and lets see where it leads me.

Quote of the week

“Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain”
-- Mr. Arthur Weasley, Harry Potter and the Chambers of secret (Chapter 18)

I don’t know how I picked it up. But it hit me right on. LLMs are like Tom Riddle’s diary, aren’t they? I feel so relatable here. Software developers like me are Ginny and they hallucinate us to do certain things in a certain way and we follow it, like in a trance, and it makes the software collapse. What a relatable quote. It makes me think that reading fiction is healing. For nerds like me, I would just read and escape the world.

Read

Craft Software that make people feel something
1. So good. Just do it because there is a curiosity. Inspiration is also cool and need for software to make.
  > When programming becomes repetitive, the odds of you creating something that makes people go “wow” are reduced quite a bit. It isn’t a rule, of course. You need to be inspired to make inspiring software.
2. This is aspiration, the level of it is high here.
  > This is what I’m talking about: taking time to build something so that once people try it, they remember it for as long as they live.
If you’re going to vibe code, why not do it in C or even Assembly
1. Yeah! This is a valid point, If you are not caring about the code, why bother with the language.
2. Choose a language which computers can understand the best, x86 or even machine code, 1s and 0s.
3. Stephen says to create a VOPL vibe-oriented-programming-language which suits LLMs. Maybe this is what it will look it, who knows.
4. But the point is strong, if vibe coding is not caring about programming, why bother choosing tech stack and languages, just let it choose whichever it is familiar and good at just like a good’ol developer.
Why Transformers must hallucinate
1. This is a spicy take. The points are valid
  1. Averaging is a critical mistake
  2. They miss checking whether an answer exist or not
  3. Always answers will guarantee hallucination
  4. It should asses the question, then generate and not generate and then asses.
Please don’t automate science
1. Boy, it takes courage to speak this! Well spoken.
  > They are here because they love research and want to contribute to advancing human knowledge. If you take the human out of the loop, meaning that humans no longer have any role in scientific research, you’re depriving them of the activity they love and a key source of meaning in their lives. And we all want to do something meaningful. Why, I asked, do you want to take the opportunity to contribute to science away from us?
2. This hits it harder
  > Science automation is coming whether we want it or not, and we’d better get used to it. The train is coming, and we can get on it or stand in its way.
  > I think that is a remarkably cowardly argument.
  > It is up to us as a society to decide how we use the technology we develop. It’s not a train, it’s a truck, and we’d better grab the steering wheel.
3. There are bangers after bangers
  > Making human intellectual or creative work redundant is something we should avoid when we can, and we should absolutely avoid it if there are no equally meaningful new roles for humans to transition into.
4. I want to quote each and every paragraph it seems, this is so good, almost like it comes out of my mouth
  > You could further argue that working on cutting humans out of meaningful creative work such as scientific research is incredibly egoistic. You get the intellectual satisfaction of inventing new AI methods, but the next generation don’t get a chance to contribute. Why do you want to rob your children (academic and biological) of the chance to engage in the most meaningful activity in the world?
5. So true, I have been here when there was model after model releases in a week, i think in August-September. It was a wild month. I was overwhelmed, I didn’t get a chance to slow down. AI can do a lot of things, can produce a lot of things, and I cannot handle it at that pace. I need time to absorb, it makes productive, true, but it quickly overshoots the danger productive bar. The moment where you are too much productive that you lose track of every context in your head.
Software never Fails
1. It never fails. It does what it was intended to do. If the intended thing and the actual thing was different than that’s a developer problem and not the software’s. It did what was written as its not a magic wand that will do what you thought to do.
I read more than I write, do you?
1. Yes, this is true for me too. Reading needs to be more or rather at certain point, balanced from writing.
2. You can’t just keep on reading and produce nothing. You will have to reflect on what you have consumed. This newsletter is exactly that.
  1. After I got a full time job, I suddenly had a lot of time, I realized i needed to dump my learning somewhere and I was following Register Spill by Thorsten Ball and quickly felt the urge to log my reading and interesting things I find throughout the week. There were a lot of things, I took for granted, they got lost and most of the things didn’t stick. I started this and it helped me realize the ample amount of time I have to learn, explore and tinker on stuff. It was liberating. Hence writing the 72nd edition of this. Its fun.
Vibe Coding is made and depressing
1. Sigh, The frustration is quite evident
  > I just feel sad with how AI has bastardized my profession, which I worked hard for the last 15 years. There is no best practices anymore, no proper process, no meaningful back and forth
2. I can even feel it with 5 years of coding, man has been doing it for 15 years! Humans gets too excited when they can produce code i think.
The Gemini API Key Frustration
1. Yeah! have you set up Google products without opening and closing a bunch of tabs
2. Here you are in 2025. Wait a minute, was PaLM a thing? wasn’t google notes to be shut down?
3. What is happening, what is AI Studio, Vertex AI, Jules, Antigravity, Gemini CLI, Gemini models of course, dug sneaked into various products, geese. Google!
A TSP game I wanted for 10 years: built in 4 hours
1. This is quite a good thing, I am not good at frontend, i let ai do it, i do what i am good at, writing backend. Really? need to see it carefully again.
Growing Software
1. What a great analogy. Software is not architect a building but its growing a garden. You don’t have a layout already built, some parts are clear not all. Software is ever changing. You need to build something, observe and change constantly just like a gardener. Gardener doesn’t plant a bunch of plants and forgets, but rather it nurtures them, observes and then takes care of them.
2. Software is not something you build, its something you grow. Its a slow process.
How HTML changes in EPUB
1. This is quite intuitive. I didn’t knew epub is a collection of XHTML documents. Its quite obvious now.
2. Because e-book has to be scaled from each character, so it is xhtml or some variant of it. Zooming, Changing fonts, all happens at all levels or doesn’t look good. So that is the perfect use case for it.

Created

SQLog: Create Strict Tables
Live streaming Advent of Code Day 1 and 2 in Golang
YouTube Shorts on FreeCodeCamp Daily Challenges

Watched

Software is getting worse
- Yes, This is true, from I have not observed actively, but looks valid and intuitive
  - We need these three ingredients for a good software
    - Passion
    - Trying to solve a problem with care
    - Developers been funded or are self sustainable

As the software gets old it get big
As the software gets big, it gets worse

These are not the things responsible for bad software (might be but not only)
- AI Slop
- Not using Rust (or any other framework or language)
- It’s an Electron app (or using a particular framework or language)
STRING is actually an integer type
- Everything is flexible unless you type strict
- SQLite is flexible, as I have said its a double-edged sword until you don’t want it to be.
Just use Postgres
- Wow! I love this. I want to write a technical book too. It is such a great adventure to be in. But burnout seems to be stronger there.
- I love Postgres can be used as a message queue, gen ai application, full text search I knew and JSON was obvious.
- Getting deep into the tech is important, I need to focus on thing at a time.

Learnt

Using Strict mode in table creation in SQLite.
- If you enable strict option while creating a table, you need to specify either of the 4 types (int, text, blob, any), Don’t use any, it defeats the purpose of using strict option.
- You will lose the flexibility entirely when you type strict, can’t even ignore the type before a column while creating the table.
Code generation is getting cheaper
- Look around, there are 10s of agentic CLIs and what not, everyone is commoditizing the AI tokens, its getting cheaper too. The speed at which it generates stuff (not quality, quantity) matters in code, if you know what you are doing, then you can ster it quickly to get results quick. I have learnt it the hard way, by vibing hard and after 4 years of hard work. It finaly feels I can understand the productive side of AI coding.

Tech News

OpenAI Launches GPT-5.2
- Everyone says it will be a best model for a while, and then silence. It just amalgamates into the slop. Nothing major I can see, 0.01% maybe.
Google Rolls Out Reimagined Gemini Deep Research
- This is something cool, but deep research is neither deep nor its a research, its just summarising the links into a hallucinated piece of document.
Agentic AI Foundation Launched Under Linux Foundation
- Wow! Anthropic in opensource, who would have thought.
- Anthropic donated MCP, OpenAI with Agents.md (I am actually confused, what is a agent and file name belonging to a company, why they own it?), Goose from Block.

That’s it from the week. I am excited to code more in parallel, by spawning the agents in the background and reviewing the code. Yes, I no more write code by hand. I like to when I do, but as a software developer and employee, I don’t write code as I used to a year back. I spawn code agents and heavily review its output. Embrace the way it is, adapt the skills, there’s no other way.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#774th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

See you next week!

Happy Coding

Leave a comment

Share Techstructive Weekly

Techstructive Weekly 71

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #71

It was a roller-coaster week. Half of the week, it was travelling and outside. The rest was coping with AI news and code agents. Getting back to work after a week is a bit stressful and brings a bit of hurdle of health. I wasn’t quite well for a couple of days after the trip, and couldn’t really work at my 100% best. So, this weekend I would be pacing up, slowing down when needed to rest with ease. I have a few plans for Advent of Code, I haven’ gotten the time to solve even the first problem, looking forward to the weekend to keeping up with it.

On the AI side, there were a lot of releases and news all over the place. Anthropic with a wired deal, OpenAI with its red alert, Mistral with a new family of models, and Deepseek with frontier model releases. The tech is moving faster then ever, and I am finding it really overwhelming, its hard to keep up with the models.

Quote of the week

“It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What’s hard is not the work itself, but the belief that we are worthy of doing it.”
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

I’ll leave it here. I have wrote almost consistently for 30 days. 1000+ words each day. Crossing even 2k mark on couple of days. I am also on a 71 week streak on this newsletter. I write consistently, it’s not hard to write, its just hard to sit and start. The rest is flow, the rest is not art, it’s intuition and the muscle that develops over time. Real art is fighting the initial hurdle, the resistance to begin is hardest, the rest is smooth ride, once one is immersed.

Read

On 10 years of writing a blog that nobody reads
- Interesting take on writing in the age of AI, relating to breathe, inhale -> read, exhale -> review and reflect
All it takes is for one to work out
- Yes, this is true. For it to happen though you might have to attempt 99 shots, good or bad, doesn’t matter, that’s what the journey is about. Figuring and Learning things through action.

Watched

Google’s Nano Banana Pro Image Generation Model
- He is saying he won’t use Adobe Photoshop anymore, my god. This models are getting into our heads. Art is at stake, or is it.
- The SynthID is not quite a solution, just a label from Google or a tag to show that they care about safety but they don’t know how to.
- The quality of these images is so crisp, OpenAI models have some edgy and fainted colors, but Google’s models are so vibrant.
Anthropic acquires Bun
- Yes, this is a wired deal. No one really knows what is happening and what they are going to do. Bun was a good step. The decision to merge into Anthropic might be good as they are now paid to do their work.
- Sustainability is solved, but what if they are no longer the owner of the product or the tool? What about the future of it? We have seen open source project falter under big companies.
Anthropic confirms software engineering is not dead
- Six months are over, we are in 2026 almost, are there developers still around. I don’t think so, yesterday I heard someone yell at a computer and bang its keys to prompt another fix. We are safe for now.
Code Optimisation via Memoization
- Such a great explanation. Drawing helps so much in computer science. Being able to visualize how each number is computed, it gives a lot of insight into what the pattern is being repeated and carve out the commonality in the pattern.

Learnt

Grabbing Slack token for custom scripts
- If you wanted to scrap data from an alert channel in slack, then you have to go to the web platform and perform a certain operations for authenticating the api from the script.
- Any conversation like api request in the network tab, can fetch you the token in the payload, usually beginning with xoxc-. Store it and then you can request any messages from any channel or chat. Simple.
Google Sheets Count formula
- Use COUNTA with the parameters as the range of rows to get the number of rows in the provided range.
- Use COUNTA(UNIQUE()) with the parameters as the range of rows to get the unique rows in the provided range.

Tech News

Bun is acquired by Anthropic
- Wait what? How? Why? Such a wired deal. One of the unorthodox deal I have seen in tech, one is a runtime or toolchain in javascript, the other is a AI lab.
OpenAI marks ‘Code Red’ amidst escalating competition from Google and Anthropic and open models from China
Django 6.0 released
Mistral 3 family of models released
Ghostty is now non-profit

I want to watch this video. It just intrigued me, I have been a django developer till late 2023. But then, AI came in and here I am. I haven’t touched Django development since then. I want to see why it might be the case, I suspect its due to ai automating the boilerplate code? Maybe the repetitive and boilerplatey code is no more a cognition on the developers, AI is doing it with flask for them. Not sure. Watch it to find out.

That’s it from this week. I have been out of sync in tech for a while. Need to get hands on and create a few project, the itch is there, just procrastination is holding me back. Let’s see if this year I can complete Advent of Code, in Golang of course, need to learn tests, more concurrent operations and stuff.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#773rd edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Techstructive Weekly #70

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #70

As I wrote last week, I would be travelling and out on a break due to weddings at my contry side place, cousins wedding, som heavy travelling no tech access for most of the time. However I had atleast 4 days of work covered so I have few tidbits to share. Weekends, three days of the week and taking leave on evening on wednesday.

I played around with vllms , new different models for different thins ranging from ad hock coding tasks, proper code editing, and document extraction usecases. Didn’t find time to read or watch much.

Not adding quote of the week, didn't get a time to read or find quotes or do much to find relevant quotes either.

Read

How i overcame inertia with a weekend project

This is eye opning. You need some inertia to get up and running. Once you are in motion, its hard to stop. You write one word, you think about the next word and it makes a paragraph.
This is true that more we think about doing things, the more wemove out from the action. It creates a vicious cycle of overthinking and inaction.
Move out of thinking, start doing stuff it will make things moving and create a flow that is hard to stop.

Shuffle: Making random feel more human
1. This is a bit under-technical thing. I didn’t get a good flow of the algorithm. i want to understand with an example.
Rabbit hole learning
1. This is a good idea, but it kind of breaks the cycle kf a rabbit hole to log everything that we did and learnt.
2. It removes the core advantage of learning things by diging deep.

Watched

How flask started as a joke
- That is not a joke, but rather a serious problem solved as a side quest and thought of just shipping things. You never know what could work and what won’t.
The Godmother of AI
- This is so cool,
- What is the difference of AI and AGi. Think about it. AI was to humans, as AGI is to AI both are same things just the level of buzz in some of the terms is just hype.
- Make humans better, making it answer things possible.
Anthropic with Opus 4.5
- That’s a minor bump maybe, its different in subtle ways. Still has its pinkish purple vibes.
- The snitch bench is cool, it looked something cooler, not much out of the wild. But different from the typical mode vibes.
You’re all wrong
- Yeah, been there done that. Twch stack and programming languages are not one fit all shape. It depends. The typical reason in tech.

It was a quick week, I am writing this out in a hurry, I didn’t have much time yesterday to curate things, but randomly scrimped through the history to find te bits I found most interesting.

Next will also would be slow, I would have to keep up at work and work up the way to get things running again. Its a hustle after a wee worth break.

Techstructive Weekly 69

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 UTC

## Week #69 It was a good week. That’s what I can say. I continued writing. I experimented with quite a lot of things. VLLMs, new models, new approaches, tactics, and read a lot of articles as usual. As I was in the GCP Cloud Log Explorer TUI in the bubbletea golang app, I vibe-coded it, I wanted to feel it. No, I am not using that to publish on GitHub. I would make one from bare hands, what to put in the model, on the screen, when to update what, which keybindings to add where, I will think about each of them and code from scratch. My goal is to learn and build, not just build. I wrote for the whole week, 21 days in the streak, and feeling good and motivated to complete the month on a high note, the project isn’t complete, but it put it on the right stage for me to complete it. ### Quote of the week **“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”**— *[Jodi Picoul](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/568141-you-can-always-edit-a-bad-page-you-can-t-edit)*I’ll go with this one. I have written for the past 20 days, and I can surely say I am a bad first drafter. I have no story, just an idea of a scene or a plot for an entire story. I am lost in the start. I still put pen to paper, wrote ~1000 words daily, and here I have some things to move the story, from point A to B. Another quote might be “As you start to walk the way appears” — [Rumi](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/811906-as-you-start-to-walk-on-the-way-the-way)I had one idea, but the start was blank. I still wrote some garbage. It was enough to help me break the barrier and helped in thinking out. After writing so much shit, not slop, I have a good understanding of what works and what the issues are. As the first quote goes, you can’t edit an empty page. There is no story to edit, there are no flaws to fix, no plotholes to patch, what is that for? You have to fail, understand the missing points, connect the dots, and move forward. ## Read [A project is not a bundle ot tasks](https://secondthoughts.ai/p/a-project-is-not-a-bundle-of-tasks)- This is one of the best and practically grounded takes on the progress on AI. If it can’t make a decision that lasts longer, it might collapse eventually. AI Coding has improved over the last year for sure, but is it there? Not really. A developer still has to understand the logic, think about the AI answers, there has to be a human intuition and judgement to make its way to a sustainable solution. - As per the growth, developers might be overgrown by 2030, is that really that quick? Maybe the plateau is almost here. It can code, sure, but it doesn’t create anything. It can create something like they are created by humans, not something out of the blue. [Alien Authors](https://behan.substack.com/p/alien-authors)- Wow, this is just wow. The analogy of writers managing a bunch of written text from AI to create their own story is quite relatable to a developer managing a bunch of parallel agents to generate code and design a feature or come up with a solution. - The whole story was really cleverly put and relatable. Though I would argue it’s quite a bad one for making one artist happy. I never want an artist to generate art with AI and tweak and tweak to please someone. Art is something that comes fully from the heart, otherwise, it’s not art. It’s pseudo art, artificial art, forced art. [Why Software Development fell to AI first](https://davegriffith.substack.com/p/why-software-development-fell-to)It makes sense now, - It is instantly verifiable> if you can run it, it has some potential - The medium is the message > Text in > text out - There is verification, and it can check itself > if there are tests, it can run, it can itself verify if the generated code works or not, and tweak accordingly - These are compelling enough reasons to understand that software is quite suited for AI to bite its jaws from. [The 18th November 2025 Cloudflare Outage Report](https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/)- Ok, that was quite a big outage. It was the biggest Cloudflare outage since 2019. Four hours. It was down, everything was down. It got a few eyes on the engineering debt. - I wonder if Cloudflare was really required in their tech stack who were affected in this outage. Really? I don’t think so, just for reverse-proxy, verification, 10 users, do you need Cloudflare? No, dog, you don’t. This is what is rightly pointed out [here](https://gist.github.com/jbreckmckye/32587f2907e473dd06d68b0362fb0048). It was a good thing, it put eyes on things which we take for granted or overlook, and just use the defaults, the frictionless tools.[How bcrypt can be unsafe for more than 72 characters](https://blog.enamya.me/posts/bcrypt-limitation)- Oh, that is wired, use Argon guys, if you aren’t just storing passwords. - Nice to know that bcrypt is not safe for passwords greater than 72 characters, who would even store such a long password? - But that is the thing, subtle decisions, like this is not a password, so we can use bcrypt, and bam, you would be wrong [Fizzbuzz without conditions or booleans](https://evanhahn.com/fizz-buzz-without-conditionals-or-booleans/)- A nice pattern like loop for 3 and 5 divisibility, it won’t scale i think for other problems [Make your own website](https://michaelenger.com/blog/make-your-own-website/)- Yes, it helps you understand what you need, what you are actually writing. I have built an SSG and learnt a lot of things. - It puts you under control, it helps you think broader, and not rely on third-party things all the time. [I can’t recommend Grafana to everyone](https://henrikgerdes.me/blog/2025-11-grafana-mess/)- Change is the fundamental in software, if something out there exist, it might not tomorrow, there is no gurantee, even if someone says so, might not. - There are rare gems like SQLite, cURL, linux kernel and some of the fundamental tools that just work and don’t change or won’t change because that is what they do are supposed to do. No more no less, more they are adding, but it might come at the cost of backwards compatibility. ## Watched [The probelm with AI Slop](https://youtu.be/vrTrOCQZoQE)- I am also quite happy, if we use LLMs to train on their own generated data, it will be a stangnation. Artists are going to thrive here, but that’s too dumb of a mistake these AI companies are to make. They can take all possible measures to make the people make use these chatbots more and more. [Gemini 3 is the best model ever made?](https://youtu.be/39PdgOYjBMg)- Its a good model, it seems its quite heavy and removes the subtle mistakes and biases it has. I love hove Google makes a solid general purpose models. Unlike OpenAI, whose naming conventions are all over the place, its like a slop generation to me. - But Gemini models hit different, they just solve what have been given to them. Quite a good upgrade from the 2.5 models. - Waiting for Gemini 3 flash version [TOON vs JSON](https://youtu.be/nTMP_rLZOYM)- Its just CSV in disguise. YAML in some other way, nothing really surprising. Building SSH TUI with Wish and Bubble Tea - It was quite magical to see the TUI on a SSH, imagine you can just use a lot of applications with a nice interface from anywhere. That is a superpower. - Charm has a really good intention and they have done a great job in solving the problems. ## Learnt GCP Log Explorer Admin API Routes - Understand the Admin API, the request-response structure. The model design for which parameters to keep and are relevant for the TUI state. - The log item components, it has the timestamp, the log level, the text, and the labels. It helps us making the design for the TUI as these are the lego blocks for it. Construct a BubleTea Application - The Model, View, and Update architecture is so ideal. It just fits well. So intuitive to use and feel. Parse TOON-like structure to JSON - Its no brainer that toon is a mix of YAML and CSV. KV fields are just YAML and List elements are CSV. Combine them, and here is your TOON. - For input it’s an easy thing, but for making it generate the TOON Structure is no easy thing. ## Tech News Google Releases [Gemini 3,](https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-3/) [Antigravity](https://antigravity.google/), and [Nano Banana](https://blog.google/technology/ai/nano-banana-pro/)- This is quite a hell of a release week. New Model, an AI Coding assistant IDE, and an image generation/editing tool. [OpenAI Releases GPT 5.1](https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-1/)- Is there a day when these companies held themselves back from releasing their own slight better models just to get a few eyeballs. - No, they don’t. They just game the numbers of the evals and make everyone believe that they are the king and worth using and making them the default. - I am sick of these tactics from both OpenAI and Anthropic. [Meta Releases SAM - Segment Anything Model 3rd version](https://ai.meta.com/sam3/) This week and the next week or so are quite busy, I’ll be travelling out from home. So might miss out on next week’s edition. Its wedding season, and I have no power to refuse the invitation, forcefully or willingly, I’ll have to do my duty as a family member. Anyway, will catch up some other week for a fresh or exhausted fortnight. For more news, follow the [Hackernewsletter](https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter/archive/772/) (#772nd edition), and for software development/coding articles, join [daily.dev](http://daily.dev/).

Techstructive Weekly 68

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 UTC

## Week #68 It was a great week. A consistent clean week. I wrote around 9k words on my project. I feel good again. I didn’t do much on the weekends as usual. I am slowing down. I did a lot of things at work, experiments, and more experiments on VLLMs and parsing documents. It’s fun times. I think for this weekend, I have plans as this post will cover what my mind is fixated on for the moment, Golang and TUIs, and a pain that is daily buzzing me, cleaning log files to get the actual data. LLMs are good at it, but take a bit of time for such trivial things. Apart from this, I have also been reading, a lot of reading, I completed a book of 300 pages in 3 days and found peace. Started one more. I want to create a webpage full of my notes and reviews of all the books I have read so far, not sure if I can do it before the year ends. ### Quote of the week “To understand emotion, don’t seek the outcome, or the reaction, go deeper, find its intentions.” This is my quote, I have observed from reading “Goddess of the River” by Vaishnavi Patel. The character of Karna, and his opinion about friendship with Duryodhan, is so subtle yet this is what I can comprehend. He went for the outcome. Duryodhan made him the king of Angadesh by giving him his part of the kingdom, to make him royal and worthy to compete with Arjun. He didn’t see the intention, his intention was to defeat Arjun. The revenge was in the minds of Duryodhan, not peace or friendship. He made everything in life less important than his loyalty and debt to repay the friendly help. If he knew the intention, he would have been on the right side of the war, maybe the war might have been averted. But no, he wanted to feel recognized and equal to Arjun too. So, look beyond the outcome, the intention of an emotion or an act. The thing that drives the emotion is more important than the emotion itself. Don’t get carried away. For similarity in this quote in tech, find the why, its important, go a level deeper. The question ‘what’ is already answered; you need the core intention to build something, to solve something. Without the intention, all software is slop. ## Read [From words to worlds with spatial intelligence](https://drfeifei.substack.com/p/from-words-to-worlds-spatial-intelligence)- This a refreshing read, a positive take on the LLM thing. Its true, the words might have limitations, we don’t even know what true VLLMs are capable of, they can’t actually recognize the physical space, and what interpretations can they perform on it. - The one thing that stuck with me was the use of LLM in education or learning. It is ranked or stated at the very end, indicating that LLMs are going to be least used to reform how we learn. If that is true, then I can take a relief. If they can’t change the way we learn things, I am a happy and satisfied person. It helps me use my brain rather than I handing over my neurons to it. [The AI Wildfire is coming and its going to be very painful and incredibly healthy](https://ceodinner.substack.com/p/the-ai-wildfire-is-coming-its-going)- A beautifully written comparison of natural phenomena to the current situation. - The reset of nature as wildfire is really needed in Tech for AI to seed its place. It would burn the hype and leave behind it some mess and blessings that people who struggled here will clean up and reap the benefits. - I don’t have much to say, a lot to say rather. I recommend just reading it, it gave me calmness, it’ll be just fine. AI is not coming to burn you, don’t worry, but there will be a new resource at our disposal. You know it, it has its pros and cons, the AI chat. [Parsing integers in C](https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/11/13/parsing-integers-in-c/)- Its again one relatable post. The author is pointing out that he saw a problem. Parsing and robust handling of integers in C. I love python for it. I wonder how is it developed on top of C then. If C is worse than python for handing integers, how is Python working so well. - cURL, that library man! The author and the creator of libcURL or cURL the tool is a legend, he is a gift to the developers and the world. The library is much more than a http client. It has laid so many ground works for making the ecosystem of working with the web and APIs coherently and without causing any confusions. - This post highlights the presence of parser for string to integer conversion in cURL as well as cURLX libraries. It handles them in a more robust way than the typical standard C libraries. [Recommendations for getting most from technical books](https://sebastianraschka.com/blog/2025/reading-books.html)- This is some gold advice on consuming technical content in general I think. Not just books. It could be a big blog post, video or any course. First consume it without distraction, try to understand next, try it on your own, try it again, think about what you want to do, do it and repeat from 2 again if you fail. [How to stop having FOMO as a software engineer](https://www.yacinemahdid.com/p/how-to-stop-having-fomo-as-a-curious)- This one is a hard hitting banger. yacine writes some banger posts. shed for a minute all the other’s expectations and look deep, look at all the stuff that truly brings you a sizeable amount of joy in life. - Yes, just bury all the expectation for once and do what you truly want to. I think this weekend, I would build a TUI for GCP Cloud Logger. Because I want to. No expectations. I don’t want to livestream, things get in the way, I don’t have the right set of mental clarity to write golang posts, I won’t for now. I’ll do what I love write now, things are overwhelming me. SQL, LLMs, VLLMs, Transformers, Vibe coding, PDFs, Rust, everything seems to sucking out the joy out of me, they are all great things, but I can’t handle them all at once. One thing at a time, and for this weekend, its TUI for GCP Cloud Logger, for sure. [Why I stopped trying to be a great engineer](https://supremecodr.medium.com/-56094c225549)- This is a wholesome post. Just read it, its so short. - It conveys that taking a break from the normal chore, brings a fresh perspective and unclogs the brain. It helps your brain get out of the rut, it shows you a new hope, it fires a kindle of hope and curiosity. I guess, stopping to code, or writing some code if you haven’t been due to AI, just do what you wanted to do, but something or the other kept bugging you. Because when the heart and mind are in sync, impossible becomes possible. [The quite power of SQL](https://blog.sturdystatistics.com/posts/sql/)- This is true. After all, sometimes, not all new tools are worth using all the time. Sometimes, maybe often times, we need to keep it simple and use the good’ol trusted tools, the simplest ones just like SQL, the dc calculator, how LLMs are using the existing tools to create wide possibilities. [How to demo](https://thorstenball.com/how-to-demo/)- Some great advice on how to demo. It has some good catches. Keeping it shorter, slowly moving to the solution, not banging it in the start. Let the viewer understand the problem in its entirety then develop the intuition to your solution. - Adding pictures add value, but I think it should be a concise representation of what is changing or what the crux of the presentation is, not just adding visuals just for the sake of it. [On doing things](https://jalexine.github.io/on-doing-things.html)- I don’t know nature is hinting this week to me to just do things. Right, I’ll do it. Sometimes ideas come when you stop trying to force them. - True. You have to just let it sleep with you. We say right, let me sleep on it, let it absorb, because the unconscious mind always keeps ticking off, it keep finding paths to connect, firing right set of neurons happen at a shower, at a walk, maybe just before the sleep. Just breathe, and let the world be it. Your in-action won’t cause it to fail, but don’t make it a excuse to never do it. ## Watched [How Martain was written](https://youtu.be/EXD3b6OLtsg)- I haven’t read Martain, want to. But nonetheless, this is an inspiring talk, as a writer and a programmer I am compelled to write a story now. This might be a turning point for me. If he can, I can too. - It appeared to me at the right time though, November in middle of NanoWriMo. Perfectly adding up to my writing streak and building confidence. [Building a terminal wizard in BubbleTea](https://youtu.be/Gl31diSVP8M)- This is a great video to understand Bubble Tea framework in almost 20 minutes. I was pumped after this to finally decide to build the TUI for GCP logger. Finally it will be done this weekend. [How OpenAI Atlas is built](https://youtu.be/jxsA_185lMI?si)- Atlas is a chromium wrapper right? right? Nope, its a little custom separate entity that is powered and laid by chromium but it doesn’t look and feel like Chromium. - I don’t know anything about what Theo said, but if he is saying its gross. It might as well be, I can’t comment if I don’t know it. ## Learnt Visual LLMs: Show then, don’t tell. - If the VLLM has visual recognition, prompt tuning will only work till a point, you then have to show it, not tell it. - Text LLMs are bottlenecks due to that exact reason, they can’t see. But if you add reasoning, it opens up a possibility. But if you power a VLLM with reasoning (Gemini 2.5 Flash) it is a superpower that you have honed it. I think this is barely explored territory and needs more eyes and experimentation. Golang BubbleTea TUI Framework - It has Model, View and Update as a core principle, which is the ELM Architecture style. - It fits this style of developing the TUIs so well. You have some state to display, you present it and you update it. Simple. You can build almost anything with this principle. Would be trying out to build GCP Cloud Logger TUI. ## Tech News [OpenAI releases GPT 5.1](https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-1/)- It looks like a general-purpose and more tunable model. Looking forward for the snitch bench test. [Google release Code Wiki](https://codewiki.google/)- Wow! This is a Holy Grail of code wiki. It can generate tons of things from a given github link. Very good point to start understanding a codebase if you want to contribute to. If you its hallucinated, you can prove it by running the code, simple It was a whimsical week, the writing just gave me everything I needed in a week. Peace and Clarity of actions. I am in the right mood, at the right time. Just by spending one hour each day, I become a better version of myself every day. Good to write this way. Hopes to continue in the next week and year too. For more news, follow the [Hackernewsletter](https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter/archive/771/) (#771st edition), and for software development/coding articles, join [daily.dev](http://daily.dev/).Leave a commentShare

Techstructive Weekly 67

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 00:00:00 UTC

## Week #67 It was a slow and steady week. New habits are emerging. It was a pleasant experience, I felt good, I kept myself out of the social media and content spiral doom-scrolling. Why? Because something changed the perspective of action and effect, the piece I was missing was intention. ### Action, Intention, and Effect I heard or read somewhere, that we feel anxious or we waste our time, not because of motivation, rather due to the lack of intentionality of the actions. If you are going to the web with a clear focus and a objective, no force or urge can stop you. Motivation helps but doesn’t carry you all the way. Its not one emotion or quality thing, rather all-hands together approach. You solely can’t rely on focus either, you need your inner fire, you need purpose, you need energy, you need the skills to do it. Nothing comes on its own with a single cause-effect, its a multi-dimensional world of action and effect. I allocated time, to write, to read. And I did complete it, not fully, not perfect, but it got me moving, I knew A and D, it helped me get to B and understand that C exists. Sometimes, you don’t know the actual goal, you assume it is something, but it reveals as you go and take action. I wrote around 9k words on my project in 7 days. I am a satisfied person. What happens if NaNoWriMo isn’t there this year, I am not after writing 30k words in 30 days, I am on mission to complete the project. Maybe I know the goal, but the actual goal is appearing as I write my way through. I am a software developer, trying to be a writer too. Its hard, but there is no harm in giving a shot, you never know what bug it might reveal, or it could be a feature not a bug! ### Quote of the week “What comes easy won’t last, and what lasts won’t come easy.” -- [Ntsiki KaCaleni](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/912622-what-comes-easy-won-t-last-and-what-last-won-t-come)A perfect quote for the perfect time. AI generated slop. It comes easy. I don’t think it will last. By last we can relate to getting the love, getting the reward, or feeling accomplished. None of it is easy to get. If it was easy, it won’t be worth looking for, right? Some things in life come with struggle, and that for a reason. If we really want to appreciate somethings, we really need to understand its value, its worthiness. We can’t get something easily and be satisfied forever with it. AI generated anything is not lasting long. Code, Images, text, nothing. I delete the code that I accepted last week this Monday. If not, eventually next week when something breaks. Because I didn’t toil hard for producing it, that’s the thing, if it has become easier to produce art or code, does it mean art is not worth it? No, AI-generated art is not worth it, human generated, or natural art is what drives me here to write this exact post, and has carried humanity thus far in the world. ## Read [Learning loops and LLMs](https://martinfowler.com/articles/llm-learning-loop.html)- This is a true analogy. This is highlighting about the world relating software development with a assembly line. In software, design emerges through implementation. We often need to write code before we can even understand the right design. The feedback from code is our primary guide. Much of this cannot be done in isolation. - I like this mindset. I agree to this 100%. Building software is about coming to a design, not just producing it. The why, the what are the questions the software development solves. How is the question that the code solves, its just a means to an end. I have learnt it the hard way. - There are no shortcuts to learning. This is another one that sticks to me. You can produce code, but that’s not the only responsibility of a developer. The code needs to solve something that you know, not LLM. You need to architect it based on the problem we are trying to solve. - Using LLMs to increase the things that we can experiment with is a good tool and direction. But then you need to plan, think, fail and iterate. It cannot be just prompt and done. You need to sit and read the things it generates, think about them, make changes, remove and write it yourself if needed. It can write code, but cannot build software solution. Yet! [You should write an agent](https://fly.io/blog/everyone-write-an-agent/)- A good one. You need to experience the thing in order to have an opinion. That’s quite obvious. But people coming on conclusions about AI and LLMs don’t quite think that way. They do one thing and generalize their opinion. Generalization of experiences is not good. - I have used Cursor, cursor-agent cli, gemini cli, and amp cli free version. I can have opinions about them. But I cannot about Claude Code, Codex, and the bazillions of those CLI agentic models. Turns out: context engineering is a straightforwardly legible programming problem. You’re allotted a fixed number of tokens in any context window. Each input you feed in, each output you save, each tool you describe, and each tool output eats tokens. - This is well put. I agree to that. People and marketing blogs really buzz about context window, but its just a list of strings, it becomes quite obvious why it can bloat pretty quickly if you keep on adding more functions (tools, its description, the parameters, the docstrings, and what not for each call). - It also simplified the buzzword of context engineering, its just what effectively you can put without repeating and keeping in only precisely the ingredients for producing the meal. [Is it really good enough](https://ag404labs.com/p/it-really-is-good-enough)- This is a banger post. It has so many relatable things and points to discuss. But the below quote hits it. Most software is garbage. AI-generated garbage isn’t notably worse. - A precise description of AI-generated garbage, its spitted like anything. I can add one more quote to this, which would be the quote of the week for this week. If a code can be produced easily, its not worth it, the thing that takes time is the worth. [Lessons from vibe coding](https://brandonharris.io/Garbage-Pail-Code/)- I would have loved this post, but the AI-generated image just threw me off a bad impression. But it was chess, how can I resist this. - I read this, and felt good. A human admitting his mistake. Going all in AI and failing hard, then going again but from the lessons learned from the fall. AI coding tools are force multipliers for developers who know what they’re doing. They’re force randomizers for those who don’t. - A banger of a line. If you know what you are doing, then you already have done your part, that is to think. - And this one too. Thinking AI eliminates complexity is like thinking cars eliminate the need to know where you’re going. You’ll move fast, but it’ll probably be in the wrong direction - Speed is useless without direction. We all can agree to that. Having a dumb engineer with claude code is -10x efficient then having gemini cli to a real soy dev. [AI is Dunning-Kruger as a Service](https://christianheilmann.com/2025/10/30/ai-is-dunning-kruger-as-a-service/)- Agreed. This is the opposite of imposter syndrome. It hits like ego. You think, that you have done the job without thinking. We are at such a conjecture that we are trying to feel like done something without doing it. AI-art for instance, if you put it on your thumbnail or post it, what are you really doing, pretending that you made it? Having the feel of creating something without creating it? - I stopped creating ai generated thumbnails on this newsletter after a couple of attempts as it felt boring. I didn’t get anything from that. No satisfaction nor skill. [Mr. TIFF](https://inventingthefuture.ghost.io/mr-tiff/)- It was just a pleasant read. No controversy, no fluff. Just two humble and honest humans doing their job. This world would be so beautiful if each human did its job correctly, just correctly, not exceeding the expectation or performing a all-nighter. Just completing his or her job correctly is so under-rated. ## Watched I haven’t watched anything this week that is worth sharing and technical enough. I have replaced my youtube watching time with 1 hour writing sprints. For the past whole week, I wrote around 9k words. I had a goal and I am moving towards it. I don’t know if youtube is worth watching anymore. I’ll enjoy other things while I can. ## Learnt Flask has a [after_request](https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/stable/api/#flask.Flask.after_request) decorator/hook, that we can use to run at the end of a request.- I added it to log a request, created a state and appended/put to the state after a even happening at any part of the API. Then using that state, I dumped it in a log, that gave a reliable and a singular data point to gather and analysis data. A good pattern to remember and learn from. [Zellar’s congruence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeller%27s_congruence) algorithm to calculate the weekday from a given date- This was a problem of the day in the freecodecamp daily challenge. I love it, it helped me learn this algorithm. Its so trivial to implement yet feels so useful to get weekday of any given date. Leave the timezone mess aside for a moment. - It as simple as this `year, month, day = 2025, 11, 05 if month < 3: month = month + 12 year = year - 1 k = year % 100 j = year // 100 day_digit = (day + (13 * (month+1)) // 5 + k + k // 4 + j // 4 + 5 * j) % 7 # 0 is Saturday, 1 is Sunday and so on.`## Tech News [Moonshot.ai](http://Moonshot.ai) releases [Kimi K2 Thinking model](https://moonshotai.github.io/Kimi-K2/thinking.html)For more news, follow the [Hackernewsletter](https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter/archive/770/) (#770th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join [daily.dev](http://daily.dev).It was a fun start of the penultimate month of 2025. Hopefully, the rest of the month go just like this and I will have most of my goals of the year completed.

Techstructive Weekly 66

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #66

It was a silent week, chipping away the days like wasted days. I didn’t do much, honestly, it was tiring and draining. I spent the weekend outside, had a few chores to complete, and didn’t quite get the time to sit at peace. This weekend too, looks the same. Post Diwali rituals, guests, and functions.

I have long left the SQLog to decay, but I intend to pick it back up from tomorrow. Lot of things to do, little mental energy left.

Quote of the week

You do not just wake up and become the butterfly, Growth is a process.”
― Rupi Kaur, The Sun and Her Flowers

Some days, are harsh, slow, even boring. You have to keep pusing through. You can’t start flying the moment you are a butterfly, you’ll fall, scamper and pick yourself up. How interesting and inspiring it is. In a moment, nature teaches us so many things. Its not about how many times we fail, its about the moment we realize what we were missing and now we have it, its not about why we didn’t have it, what we did to achieve it. That is the separation from knowledge to wisdom.

Read

Grokipedia: A first look
1. I really like the post. It was a balanced take on the new hyped LLM site. It looks good, maybe it serves a purpose, but still, that 1% of the search I am doing I want to be 100% sure, not 101% confidently wrong.
2. We don’t know what this will do to the learning and knowledge bowl of humans, but it might have an impact, good or bad. It's a pivotal moment in internet history. We are either full-on AI or superhumans.
Building from First Principles
1. Agreed. Jargon creates back and forth between people. It leads to more confusion and bugs. Make it simple, you don’t need a 10-document-long API spec, a simple line can serve the purpose if the intention and the why is clear.
2. Keep it simple and studpid, this is a well known advice and it should be injested in AI workflows, they create bloat and make it impossible to review the complex tree of code.
Why Python’s OrderedDict maintain the order
1. This is nice. It makes sense now. Using two pieces of data structure, the doubly linked list to maintain the order and the dictionary for the ease of access. Balancing both the requirements swiftly.
Sabbaticals keep our attrition at bay
1. A six week, almost one and a half month break, that is a huge one.
2. I don’t like breaks, maybe it might be necessary in some point of time in someones life, the situation might demand it. But just because you have the option, I don’t like taking it. I think forcing yourself to work brings you the skill of consistency and trust.
Code like a surgeon
1. Knowing what to hand off and what to roll your sleeves . Knowing that is cirtical. I think it comes off from experience and time, you will fail in making decisions, but it would make you aware what you are capable of and what will take time.
It's insulting to read your AI-generated blog post
1. I will never ever try to use AI in writing. Becuase I want to think, otherwise what is the purpose of doing anything. If humans just hand off every bit of things to AI what is the moat of humans?
2. What is the advantage of having a big brain. Its like having two queens on the chess board and still not able to checkmate. Skill issues.
AI can write code, but can’t build software
1. They just don’t write code, they vomit and throw code at you. To review.
2. It can’t develop intuition for what to debug, what to test for. It will do whatever it takes to make it work, it could even mean to delete the test and change the code to pass the test. Keep it away from your zone.

Watched

Cursor 2.0: It just changed forever
- This is fast, blazingly fast. The model I don’t know but the speed is truly fast. If the intelligence is not degraded from gpt5, I think its a good option to have.

Exposing Brain Rot AI
- Brain rot. This is hillarious how reasoning, long context and short form content can alter.
AI Coding Sucks: Prime Reacts
- Agreed. I have never used the .md files for AI Agents, it doesn’t listen to the main prompt. How can it listen and adhere to the other file prompts? People just make it look sophisticated, but it really doesn’t need it.
- The Tab completion and one line or word completion is good, even a great time saver, but generating large chunks of diffs, nope. Thank you. I still do it.
- The war against developers using AI and a developer hand chisling code, is true, you can’t compete.

Learnt

You can use ctrl+d to select the url in the browser and edit

Tech News

xAI launches Grokipedia
- See the twist, I linked a Wikipedia entry for Grokipedia, I don’t care if it’s smart or not. I rely on Wikipedia only.
Cursor 2.0
- It has a new model, a fast model
- It now has 2 different modes of viewing the IDE, one is where you can see your agents, no code, just a chat interface. I like it. I won’t use it much, but I can see where it can shine, like just spinning up some agents to do some scripting and producing some throwaway code.
Canva launches affinity
- This is huge. I can see myself using it for editing and creating videos If I do any in the future.
Kimi adds its own CLI AI Coding Agent to the race
- This looks like Claude code, Kimi is making it clear that it is competing with Anthropic.
Github Universe 2025
- Copilot and Agent Hub and what not is release. I hope GitHub becomes a better place for software developers.
Amazon lays off 15K workforce
- A layoff after a outage, seems a little eye opener for them, maybe that was just an excuse for that.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#769th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from the week of boringness and freshness after Diwali. It could be an interesting week, if I do certain things correctly and let myself calm down.

Happy Coding :)

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly 65

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #65

A happy gloom Diwali, gone in a woosh. We are in a different year. 2082 Vikram Samvat, If you are into that. Felt a bit sad, a bit happy. Not sure what the next year might have in offer. Hopefully it would be for the good.

Compared to last tear, I find myself happier, but lost at the same time. I have found a cure to my writing slump atlast and trying to wrestle a writing routine. It looks a bit promising, 2 months to end 2025, still a comeback on the edge. This year was wild, I had severe anxiety and it kept throwing AI LLM Models every day, all day. Each day felt like waking up from existential crisis, but here I am writing it, the sixty fifth edition. More to come.

This week as expected was Diwali. A celebration of lighting up lifes, not just diyas and lamps. In the hope of finding a book revolving and giving a vine of Diwali, I am projected towards writing one myself, because it doesn’t exist. Mumbai, middle class, childhood nostalgia, mid semester vacation, crackers, New year wishes, cleaning of home and shops, lighting up the atmosphere, no book covers those. I am excited to be write that book, but not now, I will focus kn finishing the project at hand. Finishing is a skill I lack quite a lot, I want to start my writing career on a good note. So, expect a complete novel by the end of the year. Atleast the first draft.

Back to tech, I vibed a lot, cursor agent is my new thing at work. I am mostly delegating the heavy lifting from it, so that I can do the actual stuff. I also started using amp code which is free now, on my phone, just a way to explore new repositories or just implement a random side project in middle of day, its pretty cool, its UI is mobile friendly which surprised me. Really looking forward to writing about the experience and the feeling of working with ai code assistant in the terminal.

Quote of the week

“To understand is to stand under which is to look up to which is a good way to understand”
— Corita Kent

Understand, the key thing in todays AI world is so important. You have to have a good depth, a keen sense of ants eye view, not birds eye view, you literally have to dig things up. AI is there to do the general, surface level digging, anyone can do that, but that doesn't build competence and trust. Understanding does, it could be a concept, a document, codebase, tools, blog anything, someone is expecting it from you, don’t be the same slop as LLM, don’t listen to Richard Button in this case,try to distinguish your efforts from others.

Read

You cannot outsource understanding
1. So true, this is relief bringer post. People tried replacing developers so many times, yet here we are. Cleaning the vibe coded slop
2. We had assembly to programming language to no-code platforms, and now AI. They all wanted to outsource the burden of managing or working with developers but eventually they end up in more of those. Are software engineers really that bad, like people want to remove them? Why? We solve problems (and end up creating more, but the original problem is indeed solved)
3. But no one can take the task as happily (or readily)as developers because we are driven by the hunger of understanding, the curiousity that kindles and fires the rest of the way through the solution, no one can easily outsource it.
I used to like software development, but not anymore
1. Nostalgia, I remember I started my programming journey, installing Codeblocks and PyCharm. That was some heck of a task, but the satisfaction of following bucky roberts tutorials and able to understand the stuff, was pure joy.
2. Nowadays who needs to understand the variables, no LLM just takes care of it. The depth, the pain of uncomfortable is lost. The joy of finding stackoverflow question is lost.
3. Its not just AI or LLMs, but people are just working a bit wired, the mindset, the systems have kind of outgrown humans to productivity myths and its rotting thier brain.
How do arrays work?
1. Such a sweet little blog post.
2. It listed the naive array logic and then also gave a better and more possibilities for the reader to be curious and excited about to try.
15 Go subtleties you must know
1. A great post linking some gotchas and quirks about the semantics and syntactic of the language
2. Some kf them are quite absurd to be honest, as a developer who has spent 2 years writing in the language.

Watched

Richard Sutton on Dwarkesh Patel Podcast
- It was so deep, like his thinking is so defensive and critical. Some of the points I found out to be contrasting. The start was promising but he started to shade his own points I believe. The math solving problems, which makes sense, but then evolution of human thinking, the built in parameters.
- The point of having intrinsic motivation is not mentioned in the conversation which makes me wonder, why it was not? It was such s distinguishing factor, but he doesn’t wants to distinguish humans, so why try to mimic humans?
Andrej Karapathy on Dwarkesh Patel Podcast
- I haven’t completed watching it but felt really excited to learn more about LLMs.
- I like the analogy of human brain and the LLM. When we sleep we kind of reset the context window, but update our parameters, we internalise the lessons, we can think and process in the background and connect stuff up.
- I also found it surprising that reaching the state of the art models with 1B parameter would take a decade or so? Kind of practical but considering the frequency of the current releases of models, it looks it could happen almost next year.
Rust and RAII Memory Management - Computerphile
- This made me clear. So clear. But still want to put into practise. I have some features to implement for turso database, so in that will be facing those kinds of issues.
Mikebot 3000 - Can we make a open source video generation ai? Computerphile
- Wow, that was hilarious. The lora factor was so ingenuous.
- LLMs are so fascinating.
- The security aspects are worth mentioning. It always depends and will have the effect depending on the direction taken by the mass

Learnt

comm is a linux utility tool command to compare two files
- I found it used by cursor agent, and was puzzled what the heck was that command, never heard or seen. But to my realization, i didn’t knew this existed. I used to use diff, but this command is more actually like the one that serves the purpose of comparing lines or words in two similar files
How to upgrade from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04 without breaking a sweat about your data
- sudo do-release-upgrade
- Just this command should have done the trick, but I am me, and you are you. so.
- I had broken and incompatible packages especially the annoying god knows who and how it installed on my system the one and only libspa-0.2-modules
- The upgrade kind of worked but I rebooted and .. I only saw a tty interface rather than a gui. Oh my god, panic mode
- I opened GPT on my phone, explained to it the problem, and it kind lf gave some genric precautions of the things, I did follow it, not blindly because I had to type them. Reboot, still the same.
- I kept on diging the problems, and realized, I had no internet connection. I relied on WiFi, but the port was not able to work with its own 24.04 drivers. Now, this looked like a chicken and egg problem, I had to install packages, but how do I do it without internet?
- Come in, ethernet, I became so dumb, I didn’t even realise that possibility. Thanks and no thank GPT. Ahhh!
- Tried installing the bazillions of missing packages, reboot, nothing worked. Back to square zero.
- Now I had boiled down the problem to 6-8 packages not getting installed due to conflicts.
- I switched model, I gave the same screenshot or text of that, to Claude, in 2 messages from my end, swoosh, launched the login screen and the desktop environment.
- Thanks Claude, but maybe GPT solved the murky parts so that claude can wipe it one shot. Maybe, but I didn’t care much, I got my system upgraded, I now have bluetooth properly working, hopefully audio would be too.

Tech News

OpenAI launches Atlas, the agentic browser
Anthropic launches claude and claude code on the web
Deepseek releases Deepseek OCR

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#768th edition) , and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

This would be another busy weekend, guest, travelling a bit on weekends. Might not stream at all. But might build something. Not sure.

That's it from the Diwali week. Happy New Year 🎊(not added by AI)

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #64

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #64

It was a pretty busy week, not from a work perspective but from the chaotic household perspective. It is Diwali this weekend and next week. So, the preparations, the cleaning of homes, were done past weekend. It actually took my whole Sunday, sweet Sunday, and even half of Saturday. Hh! I read a lot of books, though. I found a great book that fits the vibe I wanted while being in the atmosphere of Diwali.

At work, I was busy with simple log aggregation and number crunching for all the hard work we have been doing for the past 4-5 months. The fruits and results of that work were satisfying on a personal level, but there are always improvements and gaps people find, and the harsh lessons I have learnt from the little life I have spent. I know how to stay positive and happy, I don’t need someone’s appreciation for that.

Loggers Clog

I almost gave up trying to get logs from the GCP Log Explorer. The UI is super slow. I have to be careful I don’t keep multiple tabs open, editors open, otherwise it clogs the CPU, and I have to restart the system. I have 8 GB of RAM, who on earth uses Slack, Google, and VS****, do? They can’t bear just being in the idle state.

I finally decided, I need to write my own TUI for GCP Log Explorer. I searched but found none. I asked LLMs to find me if any, but no result. I had to sit down and build it. But then, I don’t have a GCP account. I know I can create a free trial, but I want to save it for some other day, when I will probably start my startup. Maybe. So, how do I really test it? Testing with the Work credentials will be like bombarding too much, and I would probably livestream building that. So, what do I do? Use other Log providers and mock GCP Log Explorer? Maybe...

I’ll have to sit and decide what and how to build that Logger TUI. This weekend its hard to start it, but next weekend probably sounds like it.

Quote of the week

“Darkness isn’t real. It’s just where light hasn’t reached yet. Be that light”

Diwali is a celebration of light, we light our homes and surroundings and the places we consider our home, be it work or the palce where we live. Its not about buying new things, its about opening the doors that you are keeping yourself shut, its the time to dust off things and bring in the memories, the joy, the power, the flame, the light back.

Read

Notes on switching to Helix from Vim
- I like this approach of adapting to tooling. The author had clearly listed the reason, the main crux of why he chose Helix over Vim in the first place.
- I like that the language server is built in, just like PyCharm is for Python. VS Code, you have to install plugins or extensions. Vim as well you’ll have to configure LSPs and plugins. Helix is a good middle ground, I think.
- No tool is perfect, and it obviously has some quirks and things that might not please everyone, you just have to get used to them.
Syntax highlighting is a waste of the information channel
- This is unique thinking. I like it, I can see how it can help developers understand and read code. But having that specific mode toggled is quite challenging and worth digging into.
- Tree sitter is quite the thing that we can use here, but toggling different modes in different contexts is quite absurd, I think.
- How would you know which mode works in the given context? I guess you’ll have to try a few things and get a sense of what you are trying to learn from the code.
LLMs are getting better at character-level manipulation
- Its evident from the test that newer and larger models are better at generalizing Base64 encoding and decoding. So that implies they will get better at character-level manipulation and analysis.
- Sadly the how many r’s in strawberry problem will be solvable by LLMs
- Thinking is out of the equation, the crux here is the tokenisation, the better sense of the word you have, the better it understands, but the fine balance between less and more context is critical, and I think it is still being fine tuned to get a sweet spot.
Secret Life of Local First Value
- This is lovely. So well explained what CRDTs are. It’s like a log of what happened in a row of a table. Like column-level details of updation/insertion and deletion. It makes sense now.
- The metadata table is the crux of this structure. What would happen if the database itself crashes? That is unlikely, I think. SQLite cannot crash at least locally. Nice thinking here.
There are no programmers in Star Trek
- This makes me sad, if there are no real programmers, how are their services operating? If computers just work and do what they are told, why is there even a service? Why just not complete everything and be done with it?
- I wonder if 2027 be a year like that, where you say something and vibe coded mess some how works, how far are we from the reality to here?
Just the grind won’t get you there
- True, you need to speak up. Just little conversations, little efforts, small nudges go a long, long way. You never know what you would be leading to. Just keep your mind open and create a positive environment around you.
Craft, not fame, makes your story worth telling
- This is not a technical read, but worth mentioning here.
  If you’re concerned that your story is too boring, put some effort into making it matter
  Everybody has a story to tell. You just need to pick the right ones, and to give it some meaning
- So true and well said here. If you really want to tell a story, you will write one, else, you will find excuses or make a horrendous mess of AI and average slop

Watched

Claude Haiku 4.5: The best model from Anthropic for cost to intelligence figures
- Maybe its a big leap in terms of intelligence to cost ratio. We might get more cheaper models with more intelligence.
- Open Models especially the China Models are pushing these AI Labs in a better direction. GLM and Kimi K2 have forced Anthropic to release this to stay competitive and able to sustain their growth.
- Phew! What times to live in as a developer.

What is Apache Iceberg
- This was a good overview of how Iceberg is actually a bridge from the old data lakes to the modern microserver architecture.

What is Apache Kafka and where it’s headed?
- Why everyone needs to inject AI to help someone use AI?
- WHY? Kafka is just a stream processing library, why just not keep it as is, why try to slop it with AI and sell it like a AI support and what not.

Learnt

Always test after resolving and committing merge conflicts
- I just wrote a little thought about it here.
- Yes, we accidentally pushed certain changes that were kind of broken state and led to around 100 requests being errored out. Just because of some bad state after a merge conflict.
- GitHub’s feature to merge conflicts is nice and cool, but the syntax highlighting and warning couldn’t be neglected. The actual pipeline errored out but went unnoticed due to the large number of changes being pushed in the PR.
- It was a small bug, nothing major, but it shows how small things can lead to disastrous outcomes if not tackled quickly.
Vim Macros Optimizations
- If you have a macro to run in a more than 1000-line log or text file, don’t save the file as the instruction in the macro
- This led to my system crashing after I ran a log cleanup macro 200 times on a 2000-line file
- I just then removed the command that saved the file (wrote to the disk), which saves an io operation, and it exponentially saves time and memory.
- I kind of wish a TUI existed that would open the current log in Vim, that’s one idea I have as a feature to have in my project I discussed above.

Tech News

Amp is now free (with Ads)
- This is big. I am making this my default AI coding assistant from next week. I would be trying out a few things.
Nanochat
- Looks like a great way to learn about how models are trained. A very thought-through learning resource as well as a production-grade model builder.
- Unfortunately, I don’t have GPUs, so I cannot run it to test my hypothesis.

Happy Diwali!

That’s it for this week. Hope you have a great Diwali, happy new year (Indian business new year, Vikram Samvat 2082)

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#767th edition) , and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #63

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #63

It was a fun week. After a long, a long I have had the time to rip-off a code base hands on and do something beyond pushing a feature, it was about reforming how a thing is approached. I felt really good. There are always rough days, but these days, the days that give you pain but that pain is satisfying. At the end of each day of the week, I had gone and came out of bed brimming full of ideas and questions to talk and sit through. Felt I was back to the grind.

I also did a 2 hour-ish live stream. I finally started the project of creating a unified interface for LLM APIs in Golang. Felt satisfied and rejoiced in love of programming with bare hands.

Looking forward for a better weekend, a relaxing and busy week ahead of Diwali.

Quote of the week

“A world is a fine place and worth the fighting for”
— Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
I read it in the “Days at the Torunka Cafe”

This quote, just came at the right time, the right week. What a luck! The world is a fine place and worth fighting for. I had worse weeks, but the past two weeks have been very gentle and rewarding to me. I am blessed to have a job, a great and supportive family, what else a man needs? Rest all is materialistic shine.

You live and breathe for the happiness of others, and those others none other than the one that give you the support in bad days, so you have the strength to live in the world that is worth fighting for.

Created

Finally a livestream after ages. Started implementation of Gollum, a unified interface for LLM APIs in Golang. Let’s see how I can wrap it up.

Creating LLM API interface in Golang

Read

Development gets better with age
- This one was really soothing one.
  The older developer isn’t worried about the barrage of new model announcements and feature releases that come out every week. He’s seen that before. New tech, same patterns.
- And this one
  Have an in-depth conversation with your customer, listen, dive deep into their challenges, suggest architectures, migrations, and tools. And sometimes, the solution will be generative AI.
Asynchronous Work is the enemy of project based success
- Maybe this is true. Collaboration and Communication is key, I don’t think its about being asynchronous from each other. Its about being able to flexibly decide that, give enough brain space to understand and sit with the problem, to let developers cook (as in think and do their own stuff).
Give me AI slop over human sludge any day
- True. I can see this over X, Youtube, people create cringe worthy content. AI content yet lifeless, can said to be informational the least. That also has cringe element but a little lesser I think.
Why we need junior engineers
- Yes, there is no other way round. The fresh perspective is really needed to a new revolution in technology. The existing mindset, the mental model might not allow the freedom and might offer a bit of resistance to adoption and leverage of those tools.
How I learned to stop worrying and started trusting and using AI Agents
- Yes, this is true. A year worth time in 2025, we can say, AI Agents or AI-assisted coding has become really powerful and steerable.
- I also was skeptical on those AI-vibe coding apps. But then came in Cursor and took us by storm. WIndsurf, and what not VS code clones took over.
My approach to building large technical projects - Mitchel Hashimoto
- Agreed to this. It is truly valuable. Have something to make you go ahead, let that good dopamine hits. If you are doing the backend, add unit test, print stuff out to see the progress.
- Yes, sometimes experience hurts. And having the perfectionist mindset might be a little harsh.
Python splitlines does a lot more than new lines
- Wow, I knew this, but realising it again as I forgot how split and splitlines is like a magic function. You never know you need that level of magic at times, but sometimes you do.
- This is something I love and hate about python.

Watched

MCP was a mistake
- Yes it is a mistake. LLMs were launching left and right. People barely had the time to respond and understand LLMs, that these AI labs were launching tool calling, image generation, thinking and what not.
- But then came a unified way to expose the tools, but it added more complexity than decreasing. Context rot and what not. People started adding more MCP servers, assuming that it would do more stuff and correct stuff. Which is wrong, the more information you give someone, the more it confuses itself.

Theo ranks every vibe coding app
- Its kind of a good take. Vibes. I really didn’t like Bolt, maybe because I was not using Chrome? But it just kept on failing. Haven’t tried V0, I had tried the very first version of V0, it was very frotnend focused. Those were some magical days.
- Gemini and Qwen are good too, who can’t afford Claude and expensive models. We are in experimental phase, all are launching their CLI equivalents of the models. HH! What a time to be alive.

Learnt

Using dc as a mathematical utility in linux
- dc or desk calculator, a very inappropriate name.
- It is a calculator utility in linux. Its pretty basic and has only 20 odd commands, but it can do any maths operations. Apt very apt for a unix philosophy, do one thing very precisely and correctly.
Reviewing AI generated code is no joke
- I produced AI slop for a feature, or rather improvement feature.
- It was so terrible or glazzing that I had to launch a v2. But then after 3 days spending my head banging at cursor chat window and letting it rip it off and analysing it with bare hands.
- It took some time, but it had created something meaningful after all. Was it worth it, maybe. Would I have taken the same time? At the best case, yes, no maybe. But that is not the best part of LLM vibe coding.
- It is about the rest of the stuff, the benchmarking, the rip off why things work, grilling it, questioning its own produced slop, against each other. Producing throwaway test and scripts to test its own garbage.
- That is so quick, the feedback is almost instant feedback. I am genuinely blessed and grateful to have privileged to be in a company to be able to use such productive tools like Cursor, Gemini, and others.
PDF Forensics
- For creating the mentioned features, I had to dig deep, read a lot of slop to find the gems of actual features.
- I discovered that we can detect suspicious pdfs with embedded files in metadata or the actual pdf content. We can even use certain techniques to detect overlaying text in the content of the pdf with the location.

Tech News

Build Agents and workflows with OpenAI Agents
- How many startups, ideas and products killed. People create products and open ai comes with their own platform ready for it. Except for the API, none of their products get used that way like killing off the thing I think.

It was great week. Looking for a next week which is Diwali weekend. Preparation for the festival of light will be underway. The cleaning of homes, shops, lighting, lights, new beginning, sweets, family and the nostalgia of memories of childhood.

See you next week.

Happy Coding :)

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#766th edition) , and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Techstructive Weekly #62

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 00:00:00 UTC

## Week #62 It was a great week. I didn’t knew I would say that at the start of the week. But hell yes, a promotion, finally. A hope at the end of the tunnel. Hard work pays off in the end. I kept believing and finally able to bring smile on my loved ones. I quoted last week about home, a family, is not something that is by blood, rather it is the group of people who strive for each others success, for uplifting each other, when one falls down the other roots for him or her, when its harsh time, everyone steps back and stays together. And I was able to experience just that. The true value and meaning of a family and life. Not just my family. I was able to believe that the people I work with are also a family, after a long time, I was able to feel that I belong somewhere else too, I was appreciated. My work was worthwhile, the fruit of efforts are sweet, especially when you don’t expect it. I am quite happy and in a good mood. I am not able to quit this endless loop of promising a youtube livestream but keep on failing week-after-week. This week, let’s get it right. ### Quote of the week > **“**You weren’t rejected. You were merely redirected**”** > > — **Elaine Welteroth** Yes, I’ll go with this for the week. I did everything for 2 years. Same problem, same person. But things change, conditions change, you fight, you are put down, you try to get around it, but rejected, the journey seems over until suddenly you are automatically redirected to where you should have been. You get your validations and your result, you feel good, you move on. Simple, don’t remain stuck, don’t ask why? answer the questions what and how. You are in the situation, you have a problem to face, you can’t question nature, why it was me who was given this problem, that is not in your hand, simply answer what and how do I overcome. That puts you in way better position than grieving over the problem. ## Created Have stopped the SQLog for a while this week, was busy with other work and plus it was a festive season, so some festivities and longing for a deep mind reset. - [SQLog: Create Table with SELECT](https://www.meetgor.com/sqlog/sqlite-create-table-from-select/) - I found it interesting to populate dummy data from existing values. - The select statement is so plugable, it just gets into everything. ## Read 1. [The beauty of Programming](https://www.brynmawr.edu/inside/academic-information/departments-programs/computer-science/beauty-programming) - I love this post, it propagates the love of programming really well. - It shows why someone is so driven and addicted in a good way to programming, it feels like he can create anything. Someone might say, i just change characters in a file and make things happen with the machines. > you can be God. On a small scale - I love the problem from the Gaussian sum. > It’s still hard to explain what can be so fascinating about beating your head against the wall for three days, not knowing how to solve something the better way, the beautiful way. But once you find that way, it’s the greatest feeling in the world. - Yes this is the quote I live for and die for, it is the thing that gets me up from the bed each day. 2. [We traded blogs for black boxes and now we are paying for it](https://tekhne.dev/internet-resist) - We are paying for it, true, cannot stress it enough, we are just letting the humanness get away from humans. AI is doing the heavy lifting so that we can do the laundry. - Social media is just slippery slop of AI generated mess - Being authentic and miserable is more important then ever, feeling human like emotions is the need of the hour. 3. [An opinionated critique of Duolingo](https://isomorphism.xyz/blog/2025/duolingo/) - Duolingo is a great app. But it is just gamification of user attention. I tried learning Japanese, and I can’t understand the language as a human, as a repeating process it is nice, but no, it doesn’t click - I am using it for learning chess, so far it looks good, its like a textbook way of learning things. Nothing personalised or very sophisticated. But the UX is cool, the interaction and user feedback is smooth and top notch. - It is a engineering marvel, but not on the human-like-learning path. If it can do that, it is a great app. 4. [SQL Heuristics: ORs are expensive](https://ethanseal.com/articles/ors-are-expensive) - Wow! ORs are expensive. - I had never thought about it that way, would like to dig a little deeper here and learn more about the maths here. It hasn’t clicked all the bells for me yet. 5. [Write the damn code](https://antonz.org/write-code/) - I am just 101% on this. I want myself to start the code, the dopamine hit, the shit show. But AI is there to help, don’t use it as a one-shot thing to create a software wand, it is a great peer, a great co-pilot, you still need to know what you are doing. - Vibe coding is basically delaying the shooting yourself on the foot problem. - Get involved and get into the zone. 6. [Failing to understand exponential again](https://www.julian.ac/blog/2025/09/27/failing-to-understand-the-exponential-again/) - This person is reputed and he says LLMs are growing exponentially. Is that true? Maybe. There is value in LLMs true, it is hidden behind the hype true, the hype is infuated, true, but calling it exponential value, hmmm, maybe not. 7. [Advice I wish I knew as a junior developer](https://raheeljunaid.com/blog/advice-for-developers/) - This is valuable. I would add, a few more points. - Don’t hold yourself back in diving deeper, if you find something interesting, go in all the way. You’ll find yourself in a much better place then others. - Just do things, there is no reason to avoid things. Just patch one library, because you thought it was bugging you, just implement a markdown parser from scratch just because you feel the need to learn the process, don’t hold yourself back just because you’d think people would judge you, they will judge you anyways. 8. [Why hiring only senior engineers is killing companies](https://workweave.dev/blog/hiring-only-senior-engineers-is-killing-companies) - Juniors with AI tools might be worth more then seniors, because of their adoption and open-mindedness. 9. [The simple habit that saves my day](https://alikhil.dev/posts/the-simple-habit-that-saves-my-evenings/) - I need to think about it, I somehow waste my evening lying down and consuming news and tech articles. That is not wrong but I need to get the true dopamine by creating something, I end up in the same cycle of exhaustive slump. ## Watched - [Cursor AI Foundations](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuI2ZfvGpzwCEXrl_K6bW5OqNpZq3HkMa&si=NmxQoNkfB8-0zCZP) - It was refreshing to watch the tool that I use day to day. I don’t like much of its usage. It causes me anxiety. But knowing its capabilities and limitations is not harmful. - I like the way it explained, the problems with AI and its sloppiness. - [Cursor designer builds an OS with cursor](https://youtu.be/TQhv6Wol6Ns) - This is wild, I cannot believe this, it was created by AI, half baked but still. I think it takes time to clean up the vibe-coded mess, often then not, I have to re-read and re-read until I scrape it off completely. - But this just doesn’t feel natural. It might be but I am not convinced. It just feels a high effort thing, not as the author described it. “Just two prompts”, “completed in an afternoon”. I am not sure that is true, could be skill issue on my end but cannot comprehend at the moment. - [Harshad Numbers](https://youtu.be/dgwevhEykWQ) - This is cool. Harshad, meaning happy numbers, they result in full integers when the divided by the number itself form the sum of its digits. - Mathematics is so infinite, this inspires me to write code and think about problems from mathematical perspective. Yes, sometimes, that gets in the way of the actual problem, but on the leisure side, its fun to play with math. - [Computerphile: Machine Code Explained](https://youtu.be/8VsiYWW9r48) - I haven’t seen such a simple explanation of Assembly Code and Memory in my life. The comparison of register as memory blocks, pigeon holes as memory units holding volatile memory. - I want to read [this book](https://yurichev.com/mirrors/machine-code-for-beginners.pdf). This is such a great visual of how memory and computers work. I think in the age of AI, shallow knowledge is no good, we need depth and low-level details, when vibe code slop fails, real grug brain developer has to roll off his sleeves and dug deeper. - [Cluade 4.5 is the best coding model in the world? Till when](https://youtu.be/uZBjVeyiYkk) - Claude 4.5 dropped, maybe its a 0.5x improvement, is it? Maybe but definitely it has reduced its behaviour. That is a good and a bad change. - Good because obviously, it should work in friendly way, AI and security right now are two separate circles, bubbles if you will. - Bad because now we it doesn’t quite do what it is asked to do, it might avoid the things that are not ethical, but it could have side-effects where it could reject a query which is genuine and not align with its interpretation of ethical. Double click to interact with video - [Claude made its own language](https://youtu.be/BiFt4vw1-uM) - Why? Really? It goes to show that people are ready to waste money for no reasons. And AI is far far from replacing developers. - Cursed programming. Cursed vibes. ## Learnt - SQL Using SELECT to populate and create a table. - We can use SELECT statements to create and populate tables immediately, It is usually a way to test or duplicate tables in a existing database. - However the SELECT statement won’t copy the constraint, indexes and all the schema of the table, it just copies the column data, the structure and not the logic behind the data. ## Tech News - ZAI releases GLM 4.6 - OpenaAI launches Sora 2 Models are getting launched but not having a significant bumps in their capabilities, which is a good sign for humans. But these labs are just going crazy. They are putting AI in any possible thing they can, social media, if that was not a worse place to be in, developing anxiety, loneliness and pressure, adding AI to it is going to doom the peace from humans.

Techstructive Weekly #61

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 00:00:00 UTC

## Week #61 A bit of slow and disappointing week on a personal note. I tried my best to be a backend developer but was not worthy of being one, I was stranded as a product developer. I am not saying I hate being a product developer, it just gets too menial and boring once you know the limitations and the quirks of a product. Apart from the grill, I learnt a lot about tokenization. I also continued to write occasionally about SQLite in the SQLog, three more entries. Wasn’t able to livestream due to guests and was unwell for the weekend with cold. Read a lot as usual, still keeping out from the doom-scrolling spiral. It is helping me on the mental level, but need to find something in life that will push me without looking for other things constantly. Maybe my work is not helping me here, its barely keeping me in peace, need to find a switch as fast as possible, the job market is not what you want to be in. Let’s see being conscious and specific about life is getting important and need to take some actions to lift my spirits up. ### Quote of the week > *“A home isn’t always the house we live in. It’s also the people we choose to surround ourselves with.”* > > — From the book “The House in the Cerulean Sea” by T.J. Klune I completed reading the book and felt deeply satisfied and cozy. What a book, hits hard, hits home. The way it presents dull and boring life into a beautiful narrative for a transformation. The lessons of empathy and kindness, being a human is so important in today’s age. Sorry, this is not a book review, but getting into the specific of this quote is grounded in the story. The main character finds his new home which once he thought would just be a part of his job to do the needful for a month. A home is not something you just live in, its a relation with the people you make, the care each other makes, the choices and memories we make is what make a home, family. ## Created Continued to write more about SQLite, not quite continuously. I had a break on Sunday, then got back after one day gaps. So only three articles for the week. But keeping it strong and sturdy. - [SQLite SQL: Many to Many Table without RowID](https://www.meetgor.com/sqlog/sqlite-many-to-many-table-without-rowid) - [SQLite SQL: Collate Column Modifier](https://www.meetgor.com/sqlog/sqlite-collate-column-modifier) - [SQLite SQL: Create Temporary Table](https://www.meetgor.com/sqlog/sqlite-create-temp-table) ## Read 1. [I don’t want to code with LLMs](https://blaines-blog.com/I-dont-want-to-code-with-LLMs#footnote-ref-1) - This is the best of the lot. Nailed every point. - Coding was never a bottleneck, communication was (is). - Yes, it can do trivial task, but that is not 20% of developers work. - Its still bad at complex stuff. Vibe coders hit a ceiling after a while. - Reviewing is worse than writing it yourself. - AI is a tool just like IDEs, you are not losing or missing out on it. - When did learning deeper and low-level knowledge get uncool or not important? It hasn’t, its just hype, hiding form us the actual pillar behind the rise in information accessibility. 2. [A New kind of Code](https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/a-new-kind-of-code) - I like the analogy of glue code, but I don’t like reviewing code. Its skill issue on my side, yes, but I can’t stand reading code, I want to see it, I want to feel it. Generating with a button doesn’t give me any excitement to push forward to get things done. - Maybe I am naive, but I don’t like that button. Sometimes yes I do use it, sometimes forced to, but I like to keep nuts and bolt and prepare it myself. I am learning still maybe that is the reason. Can’t disagree to Thorsten, who can write 2 books about crafting programming languages and interpreters and compilers. 3. [How I a non-developer describe a developer](https://anniemueller.com/posts/how-i-a-non-developer-read-the-tutorial-you-a-developer-wrote-for-me-a-beginner) - This is so funny. I can feel this. Documentation, who writes that. - Tests, what are those? We push -f to prod - By the way, here’s the rollback script if the production is doomed. 4. [Processes and Threads: Planetscale Blog](https://planetscale.com/blog/processes-and-threads) - This was cool actually. The interactive elements really make things so clear. They remove the textual-ness in the blog and add a depth to it. - There is a clear explanation of program, process, ram, fork and low level details that are quintessential to a developer, any f-ing developer. 5. [Be careful with Go struct embedding](https://mattjhall.co.uk/posts/be-careful-with-go-struct-embedding.html) - Yikes, this hurts sometimes. Its just like SQLite, but without guardrails. Golang tries to be too lenient with the inferring the values for a struct and create a bag of unexpected behaviours. 6. [Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI](https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/artists-are-losing-work-wages-and) - This is a serious topic, I have stopped using AI to generate thumbnails for my posts and whatever artistic form I used. Firstly it looks and feels dull and un-energetic. - I do respect artists, this might be a disrespect for them to use their knowledge and wisdom without giving them a credit. - I feel bad about the writers whose style and wisdom is now in-grained in models like GPT, Llama and Claude and others too. 7. [Brace yourself](https://thedailywtf.com/articles/brace-yourself) - It is always that damn comment. Developers write code, run it, if it works, fine, but if it doesn’t work, then debug it (printf debugging) and fix it and leave, we don’t test. 8. [One last id](https://thedailywtf.com/articles/one-last-id) - Man! SQL is tricky sometimes. The number of abstractions people create in the dialects is so jarring. It really breaks stuff. ## Watched - [Tokenization from scratch from Andrej Karapathy](https://youtu.be/zduSFxRajkE) - What a beautiful piece of content. Archive and store it in a museum. The depth with which he explained it, the low-level details, the pythonic bits, is so fun and contagious to watch, and feel. - I learnt a few tricks about interaction with LLMs and understood certain quirks. This could give a intuition for why certain LLMs won’t be able to give good completions for certain tasks. - I also don’t quite liked the Sentence piece tokenization logic. But I can see where it could be probably come handy, in PDFs for example, the scope of sentence is well defined. In arbitrary piece of text on the internet, it might not be. Double click to interact with video - [Tokenization in C from Tsoding](https://youtu.be/6dCqR9p0yWY) - This was another great livestream like tutorial. The depth with which he communicated and came up with the solution is what helped me get better understanding of tokenization. - This is an example, why learning from first fundamentals is still cool. The ability to learn and explain with confidence and comfort is remarkable quality for a developer. This is also I am still thinking about doing livestream and being able to develop something from scratch. Double click to interact with video - [What is a Tensor? A beautiful intuition and question and answer based explanation](https://youtu.be/k2FP-T6S1x0) - This is a great piece of explanation. The question from Richard Feymann are so deep, provoking and sensible. The way the author explained and questioned his own thinking is really great. I liked that way of teaching. - The direction bit and the animation also helped a lot. Nice editing skills. Double click to interact with video - [I hate myself more for seeing this, than I hate javascript](https://youtu.be/7bvBVBy_CrM) - This is gross. I really hate seeing this now. I can’t bare this. - I mean, javascript is a good language, but why people just used it and didn’t improve it. The author developed it in a week, weren’t the industry leaders a bit mature to make it better? The Java developers have fixed things from it, but the thing that was copied to Javascript is still ain’t? This goes back to the meme of pillars holding the bigger stones. Double click to interact with video ## Learnt - How BPE or Byte Pair Encoding Transformer works - It basically finds the most frequent occurring two characters and groups them as a new token (apart from the individual token / characters) - These pair of word is added to the vocabulary or a lookup reference for mapping the character set to the id of the token. - Then it does the above iteratively until the most frequent pair has count of one, we can limit that. Then at the end the vocabulary developed will be used to encode and decode the content (text) - There is a sweet spot of minimum token size instead of converging to the entire dataset for maximum tokens, it can compress a lot of information about a single word that it might not be able to understand it. - This is a classical example and limitation of why LLMs can’t do math or count how many r’s in strawberry as strawberry might be a single token and it can’t get enough data about the characters in just one token. It has a lot of knowledge to get that number but just sheer looking at the tokens, it can’t. - The other example of adding less tokens is that we might have a lot of tokens for a given content and we might run of out context window to process the request. This is true for languages other than English, LLMs aren’t good at that the earlier ones especially as the tokenisation for those was not optimized or had fewer tokens due to selection of dataset. - SQLite - Create temporary tables, the temporary table is actually stored in the temp location file and in a separate database. - If you had two tables with the same name one as the primary permanent table and other as the temporary table, if you just refer the table name, the temporary table will be preferred over the permanent. You will have to use `main. `to actually refer to the permanent table. ## Tech News - [Postgres 18 released](https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/postgresql-18-released-3142/): - This has some cool features like generated virtual column as default generated columns. - [Planetscale makes Postgres Generally Available](https://planetscale.com/blog/planetscale-for-postgres-is-generally-available) - This is a big one, they are going all in postgres. - [Github launches Copilot CLI: Another entry for the Agentic CLIs, oh god!](https://github.blog/changelog/2025-09-25-github-copilot-cli-is-now-in-public-preview/) - We have Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex, Warp, Amp, Cursor agent CLI, and oh my gosh, this list is getting too big. Developers are using it, this is going to create a IDE-like war in the near future, if developers exist. - [Improved Gemini 2.5 Flash and Flash lite models](https://developers.googleblog.com/en/continuing-to-bring-you-our-latest-models-with-an-improved-gemini-2-5-flash-and-flash-lite-release/) - This looks like a good improvement, reducing the number of output token is a good sign from Google. They are not looking to increase their revenue, they are taking a hit for it. - [ChatGPT Pulse](https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-pulse/) - Not sure this is a right step for OpenAI, they are going to far with this one. - [Meta releases open weight coding model](https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/cwm-an-open-weights-llm-for-research-on-code-generation-with-world-models/) - This is a bit cool, it has almost the intelligence of Gemini 2.5 Thinking with a lot less parameters (32 B) - It also has a different and quite novel approach for a coding model That’s it from this week. It has been a harsher week. We are finally into the last quarter of 2025. Ah! That ended pretty quickly. LLMs have just consumed me.

Techstructive Weekly #60

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 00:00:00 UTC

## Weekly #60 Another great week, consistently learning SQL, developing another streak for solving problems on FreeCodeCamp with Javascript and Python, reading instead of doomscrolling. I have been learning about SQL since maybe 10 weeks now and finding myself in a good position, for the past 4 weeks I have written posts every day and it has helped me get back to the technical writing flow. On the work side, it was a fun week, tinkering with a system that is already working decently and wanted it to get the most of it, turning the bits and knobs of a system is so cool. This weekend, I think I would be simply starting a golang project to get tokenizer or something from scratch. I just want to relax and code something from scratch just for fun and learning purposes. Let’s see if I can livestream it. ### Quote of the week > "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." > > — Richard Feynman I have been fooling myself that I know stuff. Until I started to learn SQL, and boy o boy, I feel like I don’t even know a drop in an ocean. Database is a vast field. Such is life, there is a lot to learn, once to learn something, you get a little egoistic. That is where you have to wake up and be grounded and humbled, realise that what you know might be temporary or is already known or created by some other human. Respect it and move forward to gain more and provide your experience and guidance to others, the same way the people have done to make you learn it. ## Created Wrote more blog posts on SQLite and Relations: 1. [SQLite: PRIMARY KEY column constraint](https://www.meetgor.com/sqlog/sqlite-primary-key-column-constraint) 2. [SQLite: PRIMARY KEY table constraint](https://www.meetgor.com/sqlog/sqlite-primary-key-table-constraint) 3. [SQLite: Foreign KEY table constraint](https://www.meetgor.com/sqlog/sqlite-foreign-key-table-constraint) 4. [SQLite: One to Many Relation with Foreign Key](https://www.meetgor.com/sqlog/sqlite-one-to-many-foreign-key) 5. [SQLite: Self Join Relations](https://www.meetgor.com/sqlog/sqlite-self-join-relations) 6. [SQLite: Many to Many Relations](https://www.meetgor.com/sqlog/sqlite-many-to-many-relations) 7. [SQLite: One to One Relations](https://www.meetgor.com/sqlog/sqlite-one-to-one-relations) This makes it the 32 posts in total, have been writing daily for a month, and could see a lot of confidence and new energy surging within me. Writing really liberates the soul, it gives purpose. ## Read 1. [My Favorite Postgres 18 feature: Virtual generated columns](https://tselai.com/virtual-gencolumns): - I agree to this, there are pros and cons of both. Stored makes write heavier but are read efficient. Virtual makes it write easier and read heavier. You have trade-offs, you need to decide based on the computation that impacts how you want the column to be generated. - I don’t like the notion of JSON flattening in Postgres. Postgres is not a database that would be ideal for that kind of data. I know there are tons and tons of support for JSON, but tables and JSON, I can’t bare it at once. Those two are just separate entities for me. Maybe they are useful in one-off values, not not much. Switch to NoSQL if you have that lengthy data. 2. [Boring is good](https://jenson.org/boring/) - Yes, this post summarises the current trend in LLMs well. The hype is about people adopting to the value of LLMs, but soon they’ll will realise that they were on the wrong path (one example is they thinking, LLMs could replace developers) and then we will settle on the thing they are good at. I know, throwaway code, temporary code, and simple stuff that you know you need to do, you know how to do, but not worth the time to manually type it in and craft it. - I am really excited and positive about the SLMs, the small language models, I want to use it to just be a google search but simple and not ripping out my entire project into a react and python boilerplate mess. 3. [Work Hard, have fun, go home](https://www.bonnycode.com/posts/work-hard-have-fun-go-home/) - If you have fun you can work sustainably, else no matter how trendy or shinny the technology you would use, you won’t endure it long enough on the verge of burnout and the feeling of unsatisfied will crumble your efforts. - Maintaining balance is key, but flowing with the excitement and energy is also helpful not always but can be done to improve the fun and memorable parts. 4. [Building a lexical analyzer from scratch in C](https://devlogs.xyz/blog/building-a-lexical-analyzer-from-scratch) - This actually cleared up how to write lexers from scratch. I was wondering if that was bunch of if-else to parse each tokens, but we do have to group the kind of tokens and then write specific conditions on how to parse them. Now that makes a lot of sense. - Worth exploring more by writing my own markdown parser, even adding more features and syntax. If your soul screams to write your own flavour of markdown, let the muse take over you. This month or one day, not this weekend though. 5. [Creating a static site for all my bookmarks](https://alexwlchan.net/2025/bookmarks-static-site/) - I am very much this kind of person, I want to access my bookmarks and the linkblog too. - I am developing it, but can’t make it polished enough to be usable. I had created linkblog.netlify.app. This is work in progress, anyone can add but I would like to add the authentication, but that again creates a friction element, this all constraint bother me then. 6. [Python can open web browser for you](https://koaning.io/posts/python-can-open-a-webbrowser-for-you/) - Python -m webbrowser - That is so cool, can’t think of other automation that can be done here. - Neat and handy 7. [Representing Graphs](https://thepalindrome.org/p/representing-graphs) - Edge List: List (tuple) of nodes and optionally weights. - Adjacency Matrix: Matrix of each node with the all other nodes, really great way to describe the graph, has everything that is needed to understand about a graph. - Adjacency List: Map of each node with a list of nodes that are connected with it, if weighted, then can add a list of tuples representing the node and the weight. A little tricky but the author says this format is the most used and is optimal for general use cases, so seems good enough. [![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5Jm3!,w_56,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff8b68cf8-d3f4-42f6-b8dd-cccde036005f_720x720.png)The PalindromeRepresenting GraphsHello there…Read more6 days ago · 51 likes · Alberto Gonzalez](https://thepalindrome.org/p/representing-graphs?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web) 8. [Go Struct Alignment: A Practical Guide](https://medium.com/@Realblank/go-struct-alignment-a-practical-guide-e725c8e1d14e) - I have read this and it makes sense, a bit wired but nice. Writing structs should be carefully planned, so just add the largest ones at the top and cram all the smaller ones thereafter. The rule of thumb to follow if you have any memory-heavy or scarce use case. - Handy functions like Sizeof, Alignof, Offsetof are used to get the total byte size, memory alignment requirement, the field start position of the struct or any fields. Use it to craft the proper and perfect structure by tinkering and aligning. 9. [Myopic Focus](https://thedailywtf.com/articles/myopic-focus) - Wow! Fantastical and Tech stories, are my love. - Gist of the story is people are very myopic(viewing in very hindsight) about system and think of the existing workflow as ritualistic that makes it harder for others to make it better or even improve the quality or realibility. - The story goes like > A new developer chops replaced fragile ID pool logic with robust UUIDs, eliminating inevitable crashes. But their manager fixated solely on declining unit test numbers, demanded rollback. It made the project a bit risky to sustain, but the fault is not of developers. Its the myopic view that causes it. 10. [What AI chatbots are doing under-the-hood, LLMs from scratch part 1](https://www.gilesthomas.com/2025/08/what-ai-chatbots-are-doing-under-the-hood) - This is a great series, I am reading more about it this weekend. LLMs are things that produce logits, which is like a list of probabilities from a vocabulary and for each token the highest probability token should have been chosen, however it is random the temperature determines how random the selection is, 0 means choose the first(highest probable, no creativeness), 1 means choose any random one. Between these 0 and 1 you can experiment to find the sweet spot for your needs. 11. [Magical Systems Thinking](https://worksinprogress.co/issue/magical-systems-thinking/) - I love this post, it hits home for me - Systems should grow from the simplest possible solutions and then branch off from the possibilities and situations. - Creating patches to the existing systems will only survive for limited time or none at all. > Sundar Pichai estimated in late 2024 that over 25 percent of Google’s code was AI generated; as of mid-2025, the figure for Anthropic is 80–90 percent. - The comparison to AI slop is great and fits well here. Vibe coded mess is no exception to systems thinking. We have seen LLMs want to patch and keep on patching existing code mess, we want to start from scratch, the urge is right, but we worry about whether we will lose the progress? The progress is fake progress. - The code LLM produces will always be throwaway code, as it is no subconsciously written, call me philosophical, but code is art and it needs attention form a human soul in order for it to work, not technically but overall in order to complete its purpose. > NEW SYSTEMS CREATE NEW PROBLEMS’ and ‘THE SYSTEM ALWAYS KICKS BACK’. As systems become more complex, they become more chaotic, not less. The best solution remains humility, and a simple system that works. 12. [The Sad, Sad world of Tech Blogging during the Era or Technological Stagnation](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-sad-sad-world-of-tech-blogging) - There is nothing really ground breaking in mobile phones that is true, in LLMs too this seems to be getting closer to. The 90% closeness is achieved, the 10% will be like a forever process, people making predictions of AGI by 2027, and all that hype-crap is non-sensesical hypothesis. - Does this mean, tech world is plateaued? Maybe not but unless we have something wild, nothing is going to change marginally just like gpt 4 and 5 bump, they know it but want us to feel like its a jump [![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!no2m!,w_56,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0bc5fd66-6f8a-4d34-add5-3eff35a4e30e_512x512.png)Freddie deBoerThe Sad, Sad World of Tech Blogging During an Era of Technological StagnationI have a piece for Vital City arguing that, to succeed in the negotiation and compromise that will be required to build a ton of new housing, YIMBYs have to stop engaging in convenient and false caricatures of who opposes new construction. Check it out…Read morea day ago · 120 likes · 54 comments · Freddie deBoer](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-sad-sad-world-of-tech-blogging?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web) ## Watched - [David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) on Rails World 2025: Opening Note](https://youtu.be/gcwzWzC7gUA) - I can’t fathom here, how did we end up backwards? It takes some thinking to deploy to prod, yaml manifests, and what not to deploy a simple API, how the heck people are accepting those? - It is like a egoistic culture to have complexity and assume that it will work, but they are only adding complexity upon layers of complexity that developers will have to clean up themselves. - Rails is doing a phenomenal job in the developer ecosystem. Double click to interact with video - [OpenAI dropped another Codex](https://youtu.be/j9wvCrON3XA) - I agree to this, it is just a slight improvement to the GPT-5 experience. Not much here. - I kind of hate to admit that free users can’t use the web codex, the cloud instance of the agent. So, basically free users are devoid of the code experience of the GPT models. - Google might win that race. Gemini CLI is so cool, they also have Jules. Double click to interact with video - [Finding and Exploiting Buffer overflow password cracking in C](https://youtu.be/W1okWEzGAGo) - This guy is producing great stream, bangers after bangers. This one not quite remarkable but enduring nonetheless. I will vouch for persistence over hype and fuss. Double click to interact with video ## Learnt - Javascript Tidbits (TILS) - Rounding to a float using `toFixed(n) `this will round off to n digits of a decimal/floating number. Python has round(), Javascript has toFixed, kind of confusing name but fine. - Math.floor() to convert a decimal to an integer, this I used it to perform integer division. I come from python and `5//3` would give `1` but Javascript `//` is a comment literal so need to use Math.floor instead. - SQL Logs - Learned to use Foreign keys and create - One to One relations - One to Many relations - Many to Many relations - Self referencing relations - In SQLite, foreign key constraint is not enabled by default, you need to explicitly set it as `PRAGMA foreign_key=on`. SQLite is very flexible, though it sometimes feels like a double-edged sword, so flexible by default, strict only when said, kind of good, but one can easily shot on the foot. - I tweeted about it [here](https://x.com/MeetGor21/status/1967818642768470447). Generated columns are quite new. This was added in: - SQLite [3.31](https://www.sqlite.org/releaselog/3_31_0.html) (in Jan 2020) - PostgreSQL [v18](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/18/release-18.html#RELEASE-18-UTILITY) (in Sep 2025) - MySQL [v5.7](https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/mysql-nutshell.html) (in Oct 2015) ## ## Tech News - Java 25 Released - How can one miss this update? - [Compact source files & instance main methods (JEP 512)](https://openjdk.org/jeps/512) - Finally the boilerplate is reduced in Java, one less thing to hate Java for. I never hated it for that, but never mind. - OpenAI releases Codex, model, CLI, and cloud agent, or everything - Hhh! How many products Open AI has with Codex? I know the name is nice, but move on with it and be creative, the o- series was less confusing then this mess. - [Meta AI live demo of glasses that went bad](https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/17/meta-unveils-new-smart-glasses-with-a-display-and-wristband-controller/) - Atlease they tried, that’s what I would say, they aren’t faking that it works like magic unlike others. - [Notion Launches Agents in 3.0](https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/18/notion-launches-agents-for-data-analysis-and-task-automation/) - Every product is becoming something with AI. - [Duocon 2025:](https://duocon.duolingo.com/) - This is an App I am admiring for its UI and UX, so clean and intuitive - Addictive design is a different thing, but its utility and worth using - I was awaiting the [Chess feature since May](https://blog.duolingo.com/chess-course/) and it finally launched this week. Can’t wait to up my chess skills That was a heck of a long week. Lot of tech things happening. It will get even more in the next couple of months, as it is October and there are already a lot of developer related things, conferences, hactoberfests, and among other things.

Techstructive Weekly #59

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #59

Another productive week, a lot shipped, almost all critical bugs fixed, the launch looks great. Wrote daily for another week about SQLite/SQL. Adding up 24 posts. Read it here. Generating a lot of ideas, getting back to journaling, reading instead of consuming videos and doomscrolling. It is getting better day by day. I have completed my yearly goal of reading 12 books. Still 3 more months to go, would be almost at 15-18 books.

I am healing. Another week, of not writing much production code, but helping a lot of code go to production by pointing out bugs, testing, debugging and importantly defining the problem and its possible solution. Coding is not the only thing about being a software developer, there are all of those elements to that make one better at the craft.

Looking forward for a month full of SQLog, might live stream this weekend after again 2 weeks of procrastinating about it. Have a bit of ideas, and the inspiration that the coding from scratch is not dead yet, learning is still alive, people might feel value in what I do.

Quote of the week

"The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear."
-- Rumi

Ah! This is what I have been doing, just hearing what nature has to say. I am reading and journaling instead of consuming endlessly. This puts me in a thinking and attentive zone, rather than the consumption cycle that drains energy and causes anxiety. Being quite here doesn’t mean not doing, it just means to step down your brain power and think about the things happening, without getting distracted, lets embrace boredom.

Created

SQLOG Entries for 7th September to 12th September
- Continuing with some week of Learning SQL probably 8, but 24 days of consistently writing a blog post. Feels refreshing and accomplished. It really feels good to look at the number cracking up and the blog filling up, the sudden increase in likes, followers and sprinkles of curiosity to learn more.
- Writing about the things we learn is underrated.

Read

What would you do with 52 hours of discretionary time
- This is a fresh perspective, I haven't taken that analytical approach in measuring the number of hours spent in weekends. That's quite a lot, 52.
- Would be spending some time to plan and think about it, it really had me thinking now.
I wrote a journal entry for everyday in 2024
- I had journaled for 1 year in paper, 2 years on my phone, and the last couple of years, have lost that habit. Life gets in the way, your habits change, but this I think I have to keep, it used to give me clarity and feeling of accomplishment.
- It has been exactly a month since I started journalling again, pen and paper, a tiny little book, around 50 words, I would cramp 100 in that little page. I love it, its like a glimpse of a quarter in a tiny book. I am also thinking of getting back to obsidian for digital journal, just because its accessible and searchable. This article I will give credit for bringing up searching and doing some analysis on the things I have already written, that would be exciting to find how I change or my writing changes me.
The last programmers
- There is so much wisdom in this post, I feel like quoting a lot of things, but the ending nails it "The parts that have always mattered, really. Understanding people". There I put it, no fuss, no bait, just facts.
- Maybe we are the last generation of coders that type code by hand, and push to production. We are seeing the hands taken over by AI slop. I call the code slop, it is. If not reviewed by a human, it is garbage, well not entirely but nothing short of saphegetti, legacy, I-don't-want-to-touch-and-read like code.
- The author is hinting at the transition from developer happiness to user happiness. I don't like that but it's the harsh truth, the hard pill to swallow. No one will be a true nerdy developer anymore, they all would be average vibe coders. Only the best among them will be truly nerds. Will that change from now? I don't think so, people can use computers now, but in earlier days they don't use to. People (in India) at least don't know the proper usage of AI, its actual working, that's why AI-bros exist. Sadly they would sell these AI as their product but that is I think would be a skill, to steer AI in doing what you want, and for that you need to understand what they want. Pretty long rabbit hole but worth thinking about as a developer.
Package Managers are evil
- This is a fair take. Absolitely, the left pad example from Theo is one such thing. People just keep on adding packages/libraries without thinking much, in pre-AI days that was the problem.
- But now, with AI, it can spit out code like anything. No need to worry about managing packages, but eventually it will be producing more code which is a liability. AI produced code might be fragile, very like todo: authentication coming soon, like code. If not tested or reviewed, can't trust it.
- He is right on all the points, Golang is batteries included, and clearly defines what a package actually is, its just a folder. You can import anything from the folder. Except only if the functions or structs are capital case (annoying at times, but fine). Having some rule is better than having none. Javascript failed to define a rule, and NPM is a mess. Golang doesn't have a package manager, it just manages itself.
- I also find python dependency management like javascript to be honest, but a little better with terms of completeness. Since people can mess up on the web pretty easily, the things to mess up with Python have a less surface area. If you are aware of what happened to PyPI several times, you know what I am talking about, Its common to manipulate a source of truth and people might find themselves in all sorts of trouble, they would have never imagined. With uv I think it is moving to a better place, but still the core of the problem is from the too much of flexibility, which is fine, and needed even. Python doesn't needs to be like Go.
When the Job search becomes impossible
- This is gold. It might not look as relatable to everyone or even every time for those who relate to it now. But for me, who had spent 4 months finding a internships, 87 applications to land an interview, I can surely say there is a hope at the end of tunnel.
- I am saying this to myself again, maybe in the future, if this job search turns out to be the three stage one, impossible search, next to impossible search, wired search. Maybe sometimes, life wants you to show something different before you see what you wanted to see, and that might even amp up the feelings after going through that path. Maybe it was not the path for you, you were all on the wrong path, maybe it was a long path, maybe it was multiple paths, and you'll have to keep switching paths, who knows?
- I started to slow down and learn things, If people say you are not worth hiring, don't give them a chance to say that. I started writing about a skill, every single day, even if it might be very small thing I learn, I write it down in the blog. I don't care if no one sees it, I don't care if in the era of AI, blogs are not searched, I don't give a shi* about SEO, its all doom and gloom. But I do keep my knowledge to myself, it just takes a moment for someone to see my work in these days and recognize the skills and if not I still have the skill, If can't prove the skill then I need to improve.
- "Rest is all about space. It engages purposefully with serious boredom".
- The above quote is true, I am not sure, if people are getting aware about this doom-scrolling thing, but its real! I got sucked into it in the month of June-July somewhere and it felt like my brain was rotting. I immediately took a step back, paused all notifications and started reading instead of scrolling. I read books, I don't have money to buy but you know, I love fiction. I completed around 6 books in the past 2 months, and wow what a feeling to bear. Too much dumped here, let's write a post about it. Thriving in the boredom or Reading is better then doom-scrolling.
Blogs used to be different
- This is so well written, the conversations have been lost, it feels all clickbait and flow where the trend takes me, instead of the flow or my curiosity.
- Blogging in earlier days, I am speaking from 2018-2020, I knew it used to be very much tied to google, I never read a lot of blog post at that time, so I can’t comment, but can feel the lack of social media would make it really amazing back then.
13 Reason why SQL has to GO
- https://www.infoworld.com/article/2335455/13-reasons-sql-has-got-to-go.html
- I don't like this take, nor I think is grounded. Its looking like a AI slop or maybe someone just living in the land of NoSQL.
- "Tables don't scale", what is the meaning of it? If that's the case, then collections also don't? Right? I bet PostgreSQL and MySQL aren't using tables, then it means that MySQL doesn't scale, come on!
- I don't want to react to this clickbait, I already know the pros and cons of SQL vs NoSQL, SQL isn't going anywhere, and so is the good old MySQL. Relational Databases are the nuts and bolts of web, and without them, industry can fall apart pretty quickly. Unless MongoDB keeps them happy :)
IT manager needed tech support because they had never heard of a command line
- Can we all laugh here? I mean, yes its not needed, but at least heard of it! SKILL ISSUES.
- Or Maybe he was rich, he had macbook since his career began. I didn't had a laptop, I found the command line on my android phone! Also discovered the world of Vim, because Nano and Vim was the only option, and I choose the Command line and Vim came along.
Become the person who does the thing
- https://www.fredrivett.com/2025/09/10/becoming-the-person-who-does-the-thing/
- Yes, the world right now feels like everything is pushing me in a direction that I wanted, in my favor. For real! Journalling, job searching, embracing boredom, learning and locking in, and the most recent thing since almost a week, building a exercise routine.
- I also believed physical fitness is not important as mental well being. But I am coming to realize, there is no mental fitness if the body is not fit. At least it should be moving. By working remotely I was sucked into sitting and consuming junk/content. Feeling lethargic and exhausted all the time, last weekend, my brother set me up for an exercise, I felt energetic after that. I have been doing minimum 20 minutes each day since and keeping away from the vicious consumption cycle.
- Side by side, I am also on a writing streak of 24 on SQL and SQLite on my blog here with sqlog. This all is pushing me to get better and be the person I want to be. This article helps me validate everything I am doing, I don't need validation for the actions I do, but a human is a social animal, he needs resonance and some level of accountability or validation for what I am heading for is the correct place or not.
Forward vs Reverse Proxy
- This is cool, the examples, make it really interesting and relatable.
- Forward proxy acts on the behalf of the client
- Reverse proxy acts on the behalf of the server
- It actually makes sense and helps understand better.
Just use SQL they say
- Use tooling around it, there are SQLC tools for go and I think even for Python. It will help you write type safe boilerplate code in the native language as you write the SQL query.
- I think the author is right, but unaware of the tooling that exists around it.
The AI Trap: Why do they quit coding
- Programming isn’t dead. Programming is not just about coding, its about problem solving.
- The joy of problem solving would still be there. It makes a little harsh on people to quit as some of the casual programmers who tried to earn money would definitely quit.

Watched

Python: The documentary
- Wow! Just wow! From abstracting the language for making it friendly to running the world. It went from 0 to 3 pretty quick. Its the language spoken by LLMs
- Dropbox was surprising, the whole stack is Python! how would the frontend by python, maybe server side rendered, but that is really sick. The scale of that working makes me think again, is python slow? or people make it? by adding unnecessary complexity, django scales!
- I read a few post from Amir about Claude code and AI stuff and was about to disagree, but he is a creator of Flask, and oh my god how many frameworks? I took a step back and read some of his blogs again and it changed my mindset. Maybe LLMs are cool, maybe we need to be better programmers, we need to define our problems better, that’s what I was missing. This guy is a legend.
- The pyladies moment made me cry. Not gonna lie, this was really relatable. I also find loneliness and under-confident when given an opportunity, maybe its just me.
- Guido is such a humble and mature person. He took the leadership as if he was like the care-taker of the language, I mean he is the creator of course, but most of the people just take the money and go away. He lead the development forward and made the language what it is today.
- I cannot relate to 2 to 3 switch, but can understand why it might have happened in the first place. Writing an API for the first time is cool, no constraints, just buggy code to make it work, but then you realise oh, that is a bad code, here and there, and it becomes necessary to refactor in a way that it has to break the backwards compatibility.

The fastest sorting algorithm: Radix Sort
- Simply, we take the bases or digits in the number and sort them in buckets, the memory might be high, so that’s why its done per digit to avoid billions of buckets being created for each number.
- I like the approach of floating point numbers, the guy really thought it through, was really clever of using a format that would sort the number as a digit. Absolutely fantastic mathematics in this.
- Will try to implement in golang to get a feel for it.

DNS Lookup from scratch
- This was a refreshing post, it made me think,
- Programming is not dead yet.
- I have lost the motivation in streaming because of AI, no one would watch someone code something for hours, but this is bringing that back.
- The joy, the delight, the satisfaction of coding your own DNS from scratch in C, elite programmer. I would recommend subscribing this guy, full of energy.

Print function in Python
- Wow! I thought print was for stdout, but it was meant to be written to the file. So cool. I though write was the only option to write the file, but this is so crucial to know.
- Print is a very versatile function. Sometimes, it makes me wonder, is python really a magical language.

Learnt

Javascript
- 2d Arrays
  - Creating and Initialising an 2d array
  - arr = Array.from({length:n}, () => Array(n).fill(val));
  - Here n is the dimension and val is the value to prefill with
  - For instance if n = 2, val = 0 then arr = [[0,0],[0,0]]
- Set difference
  - To find the difference in two sets in JS
    - > s1 = new Set([1,2,3])
      Set(3) { 1, 2, 3 }
      > s2 = new Set([2,3,4])
      Set(3) { 2, 3, 4 }
      > s1.difference(s2)
      Set(1) { 1 }
  - Or from an Array
    - Create a set, for each array
    - Then from each array find the element that doesn’t exist in the other set
    - This will give the non-present element in both the arrays
    - Combine the set to get a array of elements that are different in both the original arrays
    - > a1 = [1,2,3,4,4]
      [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 4 ]
      > a2 = [2,3,4,5,5]
      [ 2, 3, 4, 5, 5 ]
      > s1 = new Set(a1);
      Set(4) { 1, 2, 3, 4 }
      > s2 = new Set(a2);
      Set(4) { 2, 3, 4, 5 }
      > d1 = new Set(a1.filter(n=>!s2.has(n)));
      Set(1) { 1 }
      > d2 = new Set(a2.filter(n=>!s1.has(n)));
      Set(1) { 5 }
      > [...d1, ...d2]
      [ 1, 5 ]
- String split
  - Javascript split is bit under-powered compared to the Python split
  - > s = "hello world, this is two spaced word"
    'hello world, this is two spaced word'
    > s.match(/\S+/g)
    [
    'hello', 'world,',
    'this', 'is',
    'two', 'spaced',
    'word'
    ]
    > s.split(" ")
    [
    'hello', 'world,',
    '', 'this',
    'is', '',
    'two', 'spaced',
    'word'
    ]
    >
SQLite
- There are 4 column constraint namely
  1. NOT NULL
  2. GENERATED ALWAYS
  3. DEFAULT (Not really a constraint)
  4. UNIQUE
- TABLE Level constraint
  1. PRIMARY KEY
  2. FOREIGN KEY
  3. CHECK
  4. UNIQUE
- Using combination values for unique constraint
- Understanding the difference between stored and virtual generated columns and comparing against the reading of those columns with time bench marking
- The check constraint is not a column level constraint, its a table level constraint as it can use combination of multiple columns for managing (updating or inserting) a record / row.

Tech News

Claude model degradation: I don’t use Claude much but it had a reputation of being one of the premium and high quality availability model which with this seems to be deteriorated.
Nepal reverses the social media ban as the protest turns deadly: Really a deadly situation in Nepal, I can relate as I have my work colleagues working there. Government is pretty unstable and it might create havoc for such a fragile nation which might add misery to the already poor state.

Happy Coding :)

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#762nd edition) , and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Techstructive Weekly #58

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #58

What a week, almost broke prod for half an hour! On Monday, can you believe it? I didn’t but that was a bug. Patched it and moved on. Had a consistent posting and learning sessions daily for an hour about SQL and SQLite. Feels good.

Had an situation where knowing javascript was a big deal and I don’t feel like writing javascript, it just doesn’t appeal to me, I guess I have to amp that up. Anyways, one more reason added for hating javascript, its unavoidable.

The only painful thing about Javascript, its unavoidable

Yes, back to SQL, I am absolutely feeling energetic to talk and learn about SQLite daily. I think we’ll be 100 posts in no time. I am thinking about creating and completing a project this weekend. Let’s see if we are able to do it.

Quote of the week

To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word
— Cornel West

We all have problems, but we can’t let it define us, rather we will be defined on how we reacted to them. You can give up, but either you’ll be unsatisfied or below average. You have to go through the pain in order to bear the fruit, and even if the fruit doesn’t wag your way, so be it, if you enjoyed doing it (writing or reading in my case) then I believe that was worth it. Else what is the purpose of life? Who are we really and why do we even breathe. Just enjoy the thing you enjoy there is should be no measure for productivity when it comes to living.

Wrote + Created

7 More posts in the SQLog Series or SQL Blog
Updated my blog SQL codeblocks to support latest SQLite version 3.49 checkout here
A demonstration video explaining about the blog I created link

Learnt

SQL week probably some 7, I am loosing count, let’s forget the week count from now
- SQLite has a rowid as a default primary key for distinguishing each row for a table. If created a primary key, then rowid is an alias for that column
- Different modes in sqlite and how they get affected with the headers dot command.
- SQL is a relational algebra under the hood, select, relation, union, projection, intersections, difference, joins,product.

Read

The modern job hunt: Part 1
- This was a heart warming and hope-giving post. For a person struggling with jobs, finding a new hope is something that this post absolutely gave in abundance.
- The comparison of a walk to garbage collection is so funny. Job search as a searching algorithm.
- I also like the two different contrasting thoughts and way of thinking about the situation, from
  This job search is a hopeless, unending slog!
  TO
  Yes, this will end. Everything ends.
- This hits home. Truly a great post, Eagerly awaiting for a second part. Subscribed to the RSS feed only to know the feed isn’t updated.
An illustrated guide to OAUTH 2
- This made everything click, not quite everything. I want a better example. I will write a post where I would relate it to a much more simpler and broader example. The Chase bank and other finance provider is a bit not known to me, I want to make the example clear.
- But really the explanations in this blog are really sketched out and make a lot of sense.
Why Sync?
- I see a lot of sync things, like sync engines, local database sync, I even myself had this issue on blog sync with database and github repo.
- My manager hit me, a quick sync? That’s a different sync of course. Sync!
A programmers guide to stress
- Wow! What a banger of a post, what gold pieces of adivce
  we cannot get rid of stress. What we can do is change our philosophy and the way we see things.
- This blog advocates to meditate 10 minutes a day, it helps maybe. I need to try. But that comes after doing something, you act first, then if the result is not coming, you get anxious and frustrated if it failed, in that case, you need to calm down, you did whatever you could, but now you need to wait for it to resolve or learn from the failures.
- Getting anxiety from the current problems is true, I cannot keep my mind away. I need to breathe and let it go, will try over the weekend and continue if it makes me happier.
SQL Needed structure
- This is a bad take, What is more structured than SQL? If you are trying to get heirarchial data in SQL, you will be comprising redundancy. Like literally for the ease of the access, you will duplicate json blobs everywhere. I work in that environment and know the pains of those queries. I won’t recommend MongoDB ever to anyone. Just use structured data, it would be a one time investment on schema design, but it sustains and is much easier and predictable.
- It could have been other things like sharding, I would have agreed, but this nope.
Static Site enable a good time travel experience
- A really cool observation. Anyone can pick a commit hash and simply run a command to obtain the static files. Or better just checkout to the output branch and go back to the date. Its like a time machine.
- I love static site generators.
You have to feel it
- Feel it, Just completing tasks, merging PRs, lists of metrics improved won’t help, if you don’t feel it.
- Just creating for the completion is fine, sometimes needed, if you haven’t gone through the whole feeling, but not always, you need the drive to complete it in a sustainable way.
How to learn System Design
- System design, something I can see myself struggling a lot if in a interview. Need to start this approach of creating one my approach in designing existing system.
Authorisation explained
- A nice walkthrough of authorisation types, role based, attribute based and access lists.
Vibe Coding is Legacy code
- This is the realisation I had last week too. I used agent like the code based agents to write a script that I won’t care about, some code that I won’t care about after a while. That type of code is a vibe.
Reading with AI
- People are pushing AI in wired direction. By using that for activity like reading, you are defeating the whole point of reading. Non-ficition or ficiton, if you put down the effort of going through word by word, the context, the feel to the LLM, you are doing yourself some deservice.

Interesting Links

30 Minutes with Strangers

Watched

Database System: Relational Model and Algebra
- Prepared a detailed notes as I was watching
- data model - how to define the relation, rules
- schema - defining the specifics of the data model, details
  - relational (the primary kind, we only think of this as real dbs) key value - graph - document - column - array - and more
  - Initial idea: Writing cobol in 1970s to get data, literally telling the db to how to get the data. Not ideal as you don't know if that would be ideal way to get data in all cases, example artist and album, you write for each artist, find albums, but what if the number of albums by each artist keep growing and more people ar accessing different artists data together, so not sure how to get data for any query. In SQL however, we dont say how to get data, we say what and from where to get data
  - Relational Model
    - Structure
    - Integrity (constraints)
    - Manipulation
  - Its upon the database system how to query/mutate the data
  - Components
    - Database storage(bits)
    - Physical storage (pages, files, etc)
    - Logical Schema (schema, constraints)
    - External Schema (common table data)
    - Application
  - Everything below application is a db system
  - Relation is a set, relation of attributes that represent entities
  - Tuple is a set of attribute values in relation. Primary key, uniquely identify a tuple in a relation. Foreign key, related tuples(attributes) across relations. Constraints, conditions must hold for any tuple in a relation.
  - Relational Algebra
    - Select (where conditions)
    - projection (select with what to extract optional modify the selected values)
    - union (all, must have same number of attributes)
    - intersection (same but common)
    - difference (same but difference)
    - product (cartesian product, cross join)
    - join (natural, without params, common ones, same attribute name, can use params like using **on**)

SVGs are so cool
- I really didn’t knew SVGs can be that cool, you can scale, animate and even make interactive elements.
- I need to add some SVGs on my blog. This is absolutely inspired me.

Vibe coding are three types
- I know and care about the code
- I know the code but don’t care enough
- I don’t know what I am doing
- Developers, let’s focus on the first 2 and we should be fine, the 3rd one is a luxury as a hobby.

Tech News

Atlassian to buy the Browser/Arc Company
- I don’t care.
Warp release Code: the terminal based coding assistant
- This an another weapon added to the arsenal we are seeing in the arms race of the AI coding assistant. How many we have, I forgot the count.
Anthropic raises $13B Series F at $183B post-money valuation
- I don’t know what that means, but is a big thing according to the big tech bros.

Nothing happening for a few weeks now, finally there is a slow down in the models and all this hype. I want this hype to be minimum as possible for a stretched duration of time, as it helps learn and do things peacefully.

Happy Coding :)

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#761st edition) , and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #57

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #57

It was a fun week, really doubled down on learning SQLite and SQL. Shipped a bit of code and had fun creating improving metrics on the work side of things. Able to see 10% improvement in the things I have been working on the past few months. Really a good vibe week. I finally broke the barrier or imposter syndrome and whatever it might be called it while using the AI-assisted/vibe coding things.

Use AI for what’s it god at: Throwaway code

I actually started to understand the areas where I need and can 100% use AI tools like throwaway scripts, CSV/JSON dumping, data extraction scripts things like that. I used Cursor-Agent to do the most of things and I was happy at the end of the day, it nearly one shot it, I had to do a few tweaks here and there but was mostly correct, nothing like starting to write the script from scratch after it giving up. It really helped me save at least half to an hour worth of work in 5 minutes almost 3 days in a row. I felt good, I don’t felt like doing that chores so nothing valuable is lost in that.

I can focus on the other priority items. So, this was a valuable lesson for me to use AI effectively where it shines, in generating shit lot of code that nobody cares but I need to get the job done, generate a few data points from sapheggeti logs and piles and oodles of data. I don’t care if it uses a list comprehension or a C-style for loop, I didn’t even bother looking at it, here readability has 0 value. So use AI to generate plots, structured data from logs, benchmarks (review the samples first though), among the other things.

I can breathe in comfort, after knowing that I develop that intuition as a developer, those things are still valuable and evergreen even if AI can spit out code, there needs to be the one who can guide it in a way to get the job done **effectively**.

Enough of shilling and rambling, I am back on track with the excitement and fire back, will be recording a few videos and might do a live stream if time management is done right this weekend.

Quote of the week

"You may say that it was the book, but it's how you read a book that is most valuable, rather than any power it might have itself."
— Michiko Aoyama
(Author of What You Are Looking For Is in the Library)

I read this book over the weekend, and really found it stuck with the weekly things I did. For instance, the AI thing, it might be powerful but if we don’t know what it’s capable of really and where and when to use it, it feels worthless, it feels forced, it feels hyped (not gonna lie, its over-hyped though).

Created

Added Interactive SQL Code-blocks / Playground on my blog
Added RSS feeds specific to tags and post-types
LogSQL Entries for each day of the week
- I wrote a bunch of articles around SQLite specific things like IIF, random, unistr and unistr_quote scalar functions, the read dot command, and specific things about the version upgrades.

Read

Learning Peal in one day and the importance of building strong foundations
- Great article, it shows the author cares about his craft, I can relate to the feeling of learning a lot of things.
- Doing things faster can lead to cutting corners, that’s a good take. I think we can agree to that, we are loosing the ability to know something deeper. Learning is becoming easy, but not deeper, its shallow, brittle and hallucinated. Failure-based learning is more valuable then productive driven success.
Job Churn
- Hope, is what the article gives. If the history has thought us something, then it will repeat itself and we will have jobs disappearing and appearing again, in a different form and domains.
AI Slop in Open Source Contributions
- I agree to this post, its quite obvious that if the author of the MR/PR has just submitted a vibe contribution (without even looking or testing) he/she doesn’t even care about the project, its a red flag.
- I have contributed to a few open source projects and have been on the other side (contributor side) and I use AI to understand the problem, help me write a fix, but I do that in a worktree separate from the branch that I am working, I nit pick details that I think are important, it produces a lot of things, I examine each line and word carefully and have a lot of to and fro for understanding why it added it, usually the reasons are lame and on the lines of of course why not! I delete without thinking twice.
- I think people are against using AI as is and not as an assistance for helping you contribute and solve the actual problem, if AI had solved it, why even the maintainer would require you to create a PR and all the overhead in between understanding your thoughts on this.
OCR is Legacy tech
- Maybe it is, but not completely. There will be need of low cost easy document extractions. Yes, if the cost factor goes down, OCR would be obsolete.
- I work in these domain, and can say, a lot of things are changing quite rapidly, LLMs and VLLMs are taking the extraction industry by storm.
- Its quite easy to one shot an extraction with VLLMs given the intricated details might be missed by OCR and with VLLMs, its like a brain powered visual detector. It really understands the context and its knowledge really comes in the clutch to parse almost any type of document.
- Really excited to see where my journey leads in this development
Grok 2.5 is not really open source
- The License is not truly open source
- Its not open weights as there are restrictions on its usage
- So its basically weight available model, and you can’t really get any value from the weights.

Watched

Teej Devries on the Wookash Podcast
- I like Teej Approach, read the f-ing manual. Writing cover letter, I am not sure about the people might get negative impression of AI-written, but I can see the effort put in by the candidate or the desperation of getting the job.
- Going full time on streaming is really bold decision and he is really a great person to do just that, a real practical teacher. A true inspiration.

Please Stop using booleans in database designs
- This is great advice, I get the point, having updated_at is much better than having is_complete, etc.
- The enum example also makes sense. Its basically like having a breakdown of the field into required pieces.

Learnt

SQLite Week 6
- I learnt a lot while creating the bits and pieces in my daily logsql blog posts. Especially the details of the dot commands, scalar functions and new updates in the SQLite 3.47+
- The IIF is more rich now, as it can take in from 2 to N arguments, where N can be conditions and pair of conditions to get the value if the condition is true, this is new, the older one was 3 way condition, the first condition, the second as the true value and the 3rd being the false value (it can be nested). However this both are now in the same function, maintaining backwards compatibility. It also added an alias as IF making it easier to come from other databases.
- The unicode and unistr and quoting the emojis in SQLite. I am suspecting because of LLMs these two functions were added, as LLMs are generating a lot of emojis people might be tempted to store something in the database and use it later, so escaping the unicode and quoting it is required to make it work with the unicodes.
- The read and the output commands are really interesting, the former is even recursive, found a bit of easter egg with it today.

Tech News

Zed adds Gemini CLI as a support for A2A protocol
Claude for Chrome
X AI makes Grok 2.5 open source (not really, its just weight available model)

Happy Coding :)

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#760th edition) , and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #56

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #56

A simple yet rewarding week. Continuing the learning path of SQL, and taking it to a next level with consistent posting of log like posts, reading a ton of hackernews articles, researching about AI generated images metadata, and a lot of python code.

I will try to take a break this weekend, try to think what I want to see myself in the next 5 years, 3 years, and 1 year. I really want to think what I am and want to be as a person. Thanks to the post that I read this week, also will continue with SQL lessons or even take a course or certification.

Quote of the week

“Being born is probably the most difficult thing we ever have to do. If you can survive the ordeal of being born, you can get through anything.”
— Michiko Aoyama
“What You Are Looking For Is in the Library”

This is such a great quote. It shows the meaning in birth. If you read the book, you’ll understand it much better. But TLDR is that you are in someone’s womb, you don’t know what is it to breathe, to open eyes, to cry, to feel your body, but still you move out of the womb and you are born. You faced the most non-deterministic thing. Now everything after that will be simple compared to that.

Similar is the situation of suicide or death feelings, if you are ready to give up and die, you have gone through everything and ready to get over the most dreadful things of life, death. If you had that feeling, you are at a much high tolerant level, everything else feels small and you could handle it, just hang in there, something beautiful might be coming your way.

Life is about extremes!

Wrote

Anyways, lets see what I took under the creation section for the week. Back to writing after a while. I will write things out, no matter how silly or existing crisis it feels. It is my thoughts, no AI shit, just simple old school learning.

I am also sharing it on Substack Notes, Twitter and Bluesky

Read

How to stop feeling lost in tech
- This is a premium quality post. So much valuable advice for juniors and people who are all over the place and feeling overwhelmed or burned out.
- What do you want to be in like 5 years, 3 years, 1 year? That hit me like a truck. I never think about the future, but still there needs to be specific I enjoy and would want to keep enjoying and learning. I know that's a too generic AI like answer but that is where the real friction will arise and I think we will emerge out of it with a fresh perspective. After having asked a lot of questions and having a better idea about our likes and dislikes, thinking without any pressure just gives us the opportunity to truly see beneath us.
- I don't think the steps mentioned there are necessary, like I know this might be done for relaxing the user (taking leave in the middle of a week, going a entire day at the waffle-house or cafe). But the process is to the point.
- Listing down the goals and what I want to be like a tree like structure, no cycles. Breaking down one goal from 5 year to 3, then 1 and then month and then weeks. That makes it really clear and forces us to double down on our true "calling" or the muse if you think in that way.
What makes a good software engineer
- Curiosity to build the right thing, and being honest about it.
- Trust is super valuable, I have experienced it working remotely at my 1+ year stay at my current company.
- I often just do it for doing it, then I hit it with I need to know why this needs to be done and done correctly. Then things take shape, curiosity out performs every other emotion.
Go is still not good
- I can agree to only one points here especially the standard library swallowing exceptions part. That sometimes is little on the border of Go's philosophy vs the actual issue. Just read the f-ing manual would be the argument, but it kind of becomes too verbose and critical if mishandled.
Exploring EXIF
- A great post, diving into a specific tool for a lot of things.
- I think the media metadata is messed up, the software is not consistently adhering to the standards. Look at the blog post and the Apple photos have a lot more metadata then Google or any other photo taking software.
- I have to say the different of fields are in orders of magnitude more than the rest. How much additional info they cram into a single photo is bewildering.
- I really liked the post, it had dumping of data into sqlite database and writing queries to get certain things, how cute and interesting that idea is. My brain is running in all directions at this now.
- LLMs to write queries to get photos from albums with natural language and metadata without actually processing the image, is one I can hit straight off my head.
- I confirmed that it Apple who is pouring love into those photos. It probably has to do a lot of things in the background to get the metadata. Such a irony of tech today. Lagging behind the trend but way ahead of everyone in the core.
How AI writing supercharged an addictive pattern
- We'll have been there and done that. The initial WOW! to the glorious vibe crap that comes after 12 hours of prumpting.
- I know there is a lot of value in AI, I am not a AI doomer, but the things people are assuming like 10x dev, replacing a junior dev, an intern, I don't buy that both emotionally and mentally. It just hurts the morale of humans to say that. If that is the case, then just flip the lever and let the software world be in chaos.
- AI assisted coding can be a bit addictive I agree, that's why if there is some joy in my side project, I do start it myself and then ask AI bits and pieces to figure it out, I don't let it rip my project, I am still an advocate of chat based AI-assisted development. That friction of copy-pasta I can tolerate but not the shit-shoving of vibe coded mess.
5 Docker networking concepts that everyone should know
- This was a fantastic walk-through of one of the un-explained parts of docker. Surely there are exhaustive lists of commands to perform things in the docker networking, but very few dive into the why part. This article specifically did that and all the commands made sense.
- The bridge is the safe default, setting custom host is for advanced usage, avoid if possible, only dive if necessary.
- Custom networks makes communication clear between containers
  user names, not IPs.
Left to Right Programming
- If python looks odd, how about SQL? That is left to right but evaluated mostly from the right to left right? mostly I asking loosely here, though aggregates might be exceptions and other things I am not aware of.
  Programs should be valid as they are typed.
- Good points, yes python’s list comprehension is an outlier at it as it needs the last bit first to understand the whole context.
No AI is not making Engineers 10x productive
- See the copium? Too much bearish on AI now. Suddenly people realise they need to put breaks to the hype and focus on improving the craft before cracks start forming into dents and large holes.
  Making all your engineers feel constantly anxious about their performance is bad for your company. It will make your engineers not want to work for you. This is a recipe for short term thinking that will encourage engineers to max out bad metrics, like lines of code. Code review will get neglected, tech debt will compound, and in the long term the whole company will be footing the bill of those errors
- What a relief, to hear or sorry read it. Every word of this article is healing me. I will write a separate thought on this article.
LLMs makes us dumber in the longer run
The comfort we get when offloading our cognitive load to LLMs is bad for us. Cognitive load should exist, and if we reduce it too much – if we stop thinking – we can actually unlearn how to think.
- Well said. Consistent reliance on AI is and will distinguish some human from an honest caring human.
What's the point of vibe coding if I still have to pay a dev to fix it
- People are coping seriously on AI now. Not that AI is bad, it's not yet there to build software blindly and let laymen control the steering. Devin, you tried, unfortunately, we won't be moving forward with your application.
Why building my blog is more fun than filling it
- Its a rabbit hole. I have done it and seen people do it too. Waylon Walker's Markata (its a python plugin based ssg, so easy to extend and setup) and my static site generator (I am calling it burrow, inspired as a home for golang gophers). I used jekyll > markata and felt the calling for writing my own ssg and here I am.
- It feels rewarding to show the world what you have built for yourself and brag about it when someone sees it. It's like a garden, what is writing equivalent in gardening? Planting trees, that's how the blog gets populated, and adding different things to the garden is what is addictive and feels like a gardener.
Do blogs need to be so lonely
- Collaborative blogging, I think hashnode tried to do it with community blogs and co-authoring. I like it but I feel that it's quite rare to collaborate on shared interesting topics, a podcast or a video interview might be a better fit to show the communication. Blogs don't really fit that quite well in my opinion, but yes distinct parts of the blog could be collaborated.
Stupid things that work
- I mean why not? looping one billion times in javascript makes your computer warm, fine. I would rather install and run Android studio than touch javascript. These days, running a local model around 3-5 Billion parameters (on 8GB ram) could easily burn your computer not just warm it.

Interesting bits

Duck DB Interactive tutorial
Improve your CV
Deploy FastAPI with Docker and K3s
Ask LLMs what time it is
- Prompt
  What is the time?

Watched

Tokens are getting expensive
- Geez, that is a lot of money. Models are really a way to fool and cash out money from people, these AI labs have just turned LLMs to be money making machines.

Didn’t watch anything apart from this in tech, read a lot of things this week, so off out of social media for a while.

Learnt

SQL Week 5
- Learning the different output modes of output mode of a query like excel, opening the result in a editor.
- Using generate_series to generate interesting data points
- Understanding the whole function parameters and ways to use generate series which is a virtual table / function.

Tech News

Notion Releases Offline page support
xAI secretly drops Sonic Models directly into Agentic IDEs as their Coding Models
Google almost halts the maintenance of Pytype: Another project in the Google's Graveyard.

Happy Coding :)

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#759th edition) , and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #55

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #55

A clean week, it was a festive week. Saturday was Raksha Bandhan, so almost half of the day was spent in those rituals and getting in and out of the house and guests.

Sunday was mundane as I just sat back and took a break to detox the technical things I have been doing over that last week. Then hard hitting monday came where I was frustrated with AI vibes, that left me a headache and sore throat for the next day. Took a leave for the day and was feeling better on Wednesday, cradled a few more vibe coding sessions, this time more focused on my code expertise and drove the LLM to do certain things in certain limited ways, and it worked better.

The tuesday bit is what gave me a little relief, I just layed back and slept for the most of the day, I had minor headache and throat was sore in the morning part. I just didn’t pick up my phone or the laptop till late evening and felt calm and human again. I think I can say humans need to have a digital detox day once a week or months to develop their brains again in this AI-dominated world.

Regarding learning more SQL, I took this week off. I think I need some time to accept all the things I have learnt and start a fresh next week. This is something I read somewhere that your brain needs time to retain information, too much information dump makes it harder to remember and connect things. Slow down the input and let the output process itself.

I almost completed the before the coffee gets cold series, the 5 book series, and I haven’t complained an inch so far. The meaning conveyed is heart touching, and it has given me a reason to exist and life among this frustrations and melancholics of life.

Quote of the week

“If we let everyone who dies to be a cause of unhappiness, that would mean people are being born to become unhappy, but people are always born for the sake of happiness“
— Toshikazu Kawaguchi from “Before your Memory Fades”
LINK

I read this book, and man! this quote hits home in the end. It just changed the way of my thinking about life and my loved ones. It gave me a reason to exist (among AI doom and gloom), it gave me a reason to be myself and choose being happy over sad.

If life gave you an option to choose anger over empathy, always choose empathy, this is also on the similar lines. If you have choice to be happy or sad, be happy, because that is what we are here for. Why be sad and live life like a zombie, like a AI chat bot without a true purpose and inner fire? Live life like a smiling and let that happiness spread and remove negativity.

Read

Grug brained AI developer: LLM Appendix
LLM worst when grug not know answer and hope LLM figure out.
this important distinction! many grug not understand!
- That made me laugh hard, not gonna lie. Truly relatable
AI Efficiency? Give me a break
1. People are seeing it, people are coping now.
2. AI is good, but not great. It has its value but the hype people created is 200x the value. Please, use AI I don’t refrain it, but everything has its moderation and area of use. AI for ART is pointless and gives existential crisis, refrain, I am not sure where it could be used without a thought blindly. In programming? yes to some extent in generating throwaway scripts or prototypes.
1910: The year where the modern world lost its mind
1. I could not relate but can feel the dredge in me when Machines might be taking over humans. Similarly AI is like taking away some jobs, but probably creating more to manage and architect around them, just like engineering was booming after the industrial revolution, AI management might be a field that would be full of potential.
I tried coding with AI, I became lazy and stupid
1. I have tried it too, I use it, but yes I have found myself in the author’s place.
2. It helps but only in that fine moment, after the work is done, I don’t feel rewarded, I don’t feel fulfilled, I didn’t learn anything, barely any dopamine.
3. I am better polishing off my skills
Why I choose OCAML as my primary programming language
1. This is huge post, the person lives and breathes OCAML. There are so many golden pieces of resources and thoughts. I would bookmark it for later detailed review when I think would be a right time to learn OCAML.
2. One interesting thing is that OCAML is a blend of theoretically established and practically used language. Which hardly any language does it that well, the ecosystem and the community too looks rich and supportive. These things must be true as these observations can be taken from years of involvement in the project/community.
Cross Site Request Forgery
1. Such a nuanced and detailed post about how CSRF is a tricky problem to counter. Why they exist and why one should be careful in building web apps.
2. AI generated slop code could probably cause CSRF issues but its very hard to say from a humans perspective, since the generated code is often hard to debug and pinpoint the issues as it would take considerable time to read through it.
Curate your own newspaper with RSS
1. In this constant hole of doomscrolling which I think I was falling for the last couple of weeks and finally got out by reading books. fiction books. It is important to make these kinds of apps and rss readers, as to be mindful about what we consume and at what rate.
2. In those days (2014-2017), I used to read newspaper after coming home from school. Those were just a 10 minute glance at the first 2 pages, but majority of time was spent in the sport and science zone. I loved reading it, that now makes me wonder, that even little and moderated content is enough for the brain to sustain. This never ending social media has made us brain want more and more, so we need to bring that fun and content (satisfaction) in content back.
How React works behind the scenes (under the hood)
1. Wow! What a post, I can happily say, I know something about React now. There are a lot of moving parts. I thought it was just one step compilation, but man there are layers of compilation happening in various formats/data layers I think.
2. The first one is JSON, the components and the apps are converted into JSON notation and then used to construct the DOM, that is fascinating, based on the reference to different components, it can decide which elements to render or re-render. There is a graph created so that it becomes easier to distinguish and make a hierarchy of the app. The virtual DOM as called is like the graph that helps in re-rendering, but the heavy lifting is done by the Fiber tree (which is a lower level abstraction) that does the actual replacement or rendering technique algorithms.
3. The process is so quick that the magic is not even noticable, but yes that is one rabbit hole to dig into.
Hugo + Obsidian + Git Pipeline
1. This blog gave me a idea to simplify my static site generator, instead of syncing with the database from github, I can just simply use a sqlite file and sync to the database an vice versa. Right now the problem is on the inconsistency in github content vs the database, so after having an in-memory or local file that can reside at any time on the repo, it would be easier to pull, push changes to the remote repository.
How I code with AI on a low budget/free
1. I need to try Cline, claude code router and qwen models. I have been sleeping on local hosted models, nit entirely though. I have a low spec laptop, 8GB RAM, so can’t use a model beyond 2 or 4 Billion parameter.
2. Kimi also has an API and a free credits, might as well give it a shot to use claude code for quick improvements to some projects.

Watched

Rewriting SQLite from scratch: Database School, Glauberg Costa, CEO of Turso
- I have been keeping an eye on turso, I really like the product, but now after watching it and hearing the mindset and approach of the company, I feel I need to get involved and contribute to this.
- This is such a great learning experience, I had cloned and ran the project locally last week and would find quirks and new features to implement next week.
- In a nutshell, turso started as a SQLite fork, but they realised the embedded replicas, the server and all the other things around sqlite were just hacks and they needed something better to support it natively. And hence Turso (limbo) was born which is a sqlite written ground up from RUST. I was amazed to see almost all the features are supported out of the box in this repo. github.com/tursodatabase/turso

Wishful programming
- This is so intuitive. I think Mitchel Hashimto too recommends this. He just prints out the things that he wants to get finally out and works to reverse engineer how it can be programmed. Mind blowing idea but quite simple to follow.

DuckDB in 100 seconds: Fireship is back?
- In 2025, we haven’t seen any 100 seconds video from Fireship, is this some sort of a cope to AI slop or really we think he was in crisis.
- But anyways, duckdb is cool, I haven’t tried it, it does use column based instead of tables or rows, which is kind of cool.

Learnt

Working with AI uses 2x my brain power, I am better off writing myself for complex or very detailed things I need to work on
- I was coding in Cursor for experimenting a few things on the pdf extraction and plotting certain tables and grids. LLMs are very nasty when assuming a lot of stuff and doing somethings on their own. And it didn’t miss a chance to do it there, to extrapolate the coordinates of the grid on the page for columns and rows.
- Also the frustration crept hard when the cursor was extremely slow for GPT-5 and even any model for that time frame on Monday and Wednesdays.
- I did so many iterations and finally gave up since it was quite frustrating to review the AI generated slop. I thought to myself, I could have done that myself in 2 hours rather than vibing it for 4 hours. Lessons learnt, never vibe code ever for tiny experiments or fixes.

Tech News

GitHub CEO resigns and GitHub is no longer independent after that
- People have raised concerns that it might be because of AI, but that really makes GitHub in a position of bother. It might even get backlash and people might start finding alternatives.
Claude 4 Sonnet now supports 1 Million tokens of context
- This is huge jump, it was 200K token previously, making it a 5x more context.
Google releases Gemma 3 with 270 Million parameter
- Such a small model and perfect for low end devices, but not sure about the performance to intelligence ration. Obviously it will be small, but if its faster and as neck to neck as llama 1 Billion then that makes it really the best one out there in this range of parameters.

Was a bit of digital detox week, 2 days, I just did nothing but stare at the ceiling and out of my window. This gave me a mental reset and some good vibes to just live. Hoping to crush next few weeks.

See you in the next one!

Happy Coding :)

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#758th edition) , and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #54

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #54

What a week! LLM models all over the place, gpt this, gpt that.Anyways, I find myself in a better place by avoiding AI in some places and using at its full potential at certain place, it took some time to realise it, but its kind of working now.

I don’t use AI to build the side projects like one shot, but use AI to help me understand certain topic, do something myself and converse with it about what it means, and what gaps I have in it. Using AI (cursor) at my work to speed things up and staying calm and letting things happen.

This week I continued learning more SQL, for the past 3 weeks, I have decided to learn SQL, just because I am curious and lo behold found a bug that can be fixed in SQLC, patched it, created a pull request and done. Started a series for solving SQL problems on exercism SQLite course. Finally back on livestreaming. Finally a good week, after a while. Feeling like a human, after dreaded existential crisis due to AI maybe.

Quote of the week

"The self is not found in comfort, but in the friction of becoming."
— Rollo May, The Courage to Create

I think I had been stuck in a cycle of consumption, I think I am coming out of it, by creating, I have not written much. This week I am thinking of writing blindly. I have recorded a couple of more videos for SQLite problem solving, and planning to add more over the weekend. There are a few hackathons that I think I would be participating, and would have a few projects out of it to showcase it. That was friction and that gives me the dopamine to wake up in the morning.

Created

Exercism SQLite Track: I started a series of solving SQLite problems on exercism and have plans to solve leetcode 50 sql, CS50 sql problemsets too. It will take time, but I would have learnt SQL then no other resource but practise and also upped my communication and teaching skills.
- Hello world and Local environment setup
- Two Fer

OpenAI’s GPT-OSS Models review for 20 billion parameter model
- Video and article
Open source contribution to SQLC
- Bugfix on DROP/ALTER/INSERT table values for case-sensitive table name
  - For issue > #3936: Bug on SQLC generate for queries relating to dropping, and update queries having case sensitive table name whereas, the select, insert and delete queries are case-insensitive to table names.
I finally livestreamed after a month or two about Golang project.
- Pocket clone, simplifying the initial prototype. No AI or vibing, just me and the editor. I use AI autocompletion, the next word autocomplete (calling it copilot level like thing pre cursor era)

Read

The fastest way to detect vowel in a string (Python)
1. Wow, this dude just found 11 legit (almost 13) ways to detect vowels in a string in python.Such a great depth, the benchmarks feels so intuitive as why each way performs the way it does.
2. Here are all the ways it did it
  1. For loop: Simple, readable. Fastest for small strings
  2. C-Styled for loop: Uses or comparisons, but surprisingly much slower
  3. Nested for loop: Totally exhaustive, but slow
  4. Set intersection: Clever and clean. Great when strings are long or vowels are sparse
  5. Generator expression: Pythonic one-liner. Reasonably fast, readable
  6. Recursion: Functional but inefficient. Crashes on long strings
  7. Regex search: Shockingly fast. Calls C-level code internally
  8. Regex replace: Works but inefficient. Doesn’t short-circuit
  9. Filter: Readable but wasteful because it processes the whole string
  10. Map: Similar to filter but slightly better
  11. Prime Numbers: Extremely creative. Maps characters to primes, uses GCD. Way too slow to be practical
3. Would like to do something in Golang, it sounds so fun that I can’t stop thinking about so many ways to do so trivial things.
Don’t tell engineers what to do?
1. This post, hits me and in a good way. It basically helped me get out of the self constrained mindset that I was doing wrong, instead I think I am doing my job. That is to listen and implement, the moment I raised objections or pointed out a few things, I was turned down as a kid on a shop. I am not embarrassed about it, just that the mindset in which I am working might be a little old or startupy. I am not saying I am perfect, just that there is a way to address engineers and their concerns.
2. Everything in the post that has been said, is totally relatable and worth reading for me. I read and felt a deep satisfaction that I might be just right and move on with the things.
Python’s pass by value and pass by reference
1. This is one hell of a reason, Python gets a little more confusing and less friendly.
2. TLDR of the post is that if you pass a immutable variable/object to a function call in python, you need to return it back from the function (if the function modifies those immutable objects). Because the object is immutable it won’t get updated inside the function, it will be created a new, so we need to assign it to the modified version when the function returns.
3. But for mutable objects, the function can modify it and we are passing it to the function, so the object will be updated.
The art of saying yes: How do I do so many things
1. Totally relatable post, I do a lot of things, because I am curious and excited to learn about it.
2. Starting small, building momentum, building a habit, is really what got me into this exact newsletter, one brings other, I kept writing one week after other and here I am writing the 54th edition. Not all weeks are fair, the same intensity or energy, some are dull, frustrating, just barely pushing past, but there are mostly the weeks where I know what I am doing, why I am here writing the post, full of curiosity, eager to learn more, and break prod.
Flashy, Fancy shortcuts aren’t always suitable
1. Using or to handle mutable default values in Python functions can create unexpected new objects when passed an empty list, breaking the link to the original. The standard if None check is more reliable and readable, ensuring the original list is modified correctly.
100 Rust exercises to learn Rust
1. So good. I will be using this to learn rust within a week it seems. I skimmed through a few posts, and found it really nice and interesting to go through them, clear and nice examples.
Stop building AI tools backwards
1. AI should augment, not replace, human learning through effortful retrieval and collaborative iteration. Buttons that auto-do tasks deskill users and erode trust, prioritize interactions that spark learning.
How to become a confident software engineer
1. Valuable advice and practical too
  1. Pick and learn a single programming language properly (like I am doing with golang)
  2. Write unit tests and CI (Ah, now it makes sense)
    1. I have not written serious tests in my 1 year long career, rest apart from the 4 year tech journey. Now it makes sense, there is a purpose to give me confidence to build reliable software.
  3. Make refactoring a habbit (encourage to do, but done or not is sometimes not in our hands especially for juniors)
  4. Pair with people (I do frequently whenever the need arise, and learn a few git commands and browser speed up shortcuts which help me learn more)
  5. Read books (I am currently reading Learning SQL to learn SQL in depth)
  6. Teach what you learn (doing it by youtube or articles I post)

Watched

You can just do things : Aaron Francis at Laracon US 2025
- You don’t need to be extraordinary just be out there to do things. Being kind, and expressing interest and curiosity is the way to get things done and build meaningful connections.

RSS is not dead
- RSS is not dead. Wow! I just had this vision of building a read later app a few weeks back, when the Pocket was deprecated. I want to build a combination of Read it later and RSS reader, a sync engine is something that might be used here if using cross-platform.
- Now I understand the conversation here, if someone is fetching the posts and storing metadata then it makes sense to have a paid solution.
  Bluesky post
- But the other point I am afraid of is the content scraping, is it ethical to do that? Like I know its not stealing, but crawling a legit site and using it on other platform is not good for link building for the author of the original article right? I am not sure, need a bit of thinking and ethical considerations.

The painful truth about startups
- OK, it was a harsh journey. Success is not overnight, its just a preparation for a overnight success. Uploadthing, round, picthing, and so many thing, and then finally T3 chat (chat thing, better chat), that made it.
- The salary looks like it will be life worth income. Man! india has a really low income-expense ratio.
- Just nerd out about the things I love, that’s what I am doing here.

Learnt

SQL Week #3
- String concatenation in SQLite
  - printf function that exists in SQLite. That is such a great thing to have, C like function, just drop the placeholder for the appropriate type and it will be a formatted string, neat and tidy.
  - || operator for simple concatenation. You can just use “Hello” || “ World!” to get a string “Hello World!”. It’s compact but for large number of strings, or readability, it gets a little tricky.
- I finally wrapped my head around autoincrement and sqlite_sequence table.
  - Autoincrement is a constraint that will force the newly inserted rows to use primary key id values greater than any existing or deleted primary key id values.
  - If the highest row created is deleted before inserting a new record, the sqlite_sequence comes in handy to fetch the max value of the primary key id across the table, since the value is stored in a separate table called the sqlite_sequence with table_name and the seq columns.
  - The sqlite engine decides to get the max of the seq value and the current max row id (it can effectively get it using B+ trees, as it will be the leftmost node or right-most node, however its stored)
  - I will be creating a separate blog on this, a deep dive on the various cases we can run into if the sqlite_sequence table gets altered.
- USE common table expressions in sqlite
  - This is a way to create a temporary table (like only valid till the query completes running) and use it in the main query(can have nested queries too)
  - The syntax looks like this :
```
WITH <temp-table-name> AS (SELECT something from somewhere)
SELECT something, <temp-table-name>.something from elsewhere 
```
  - This is something I studied while solving the difference of sum of squares and squares of sum problem in Exercism SQLite track.
- SQL’s IIF is equivalent for CASE WHEN THEN
  - The IIF is like an handy if else block to use when having nested conditions.
  - This works and looks neat for smaller expressions, like one or two condition max, after that its better to use CASE
  - The syntax looks something like:
```
SELECT IIF(something > 10, "YES", "NO") as answer FROM somewhere;
```

Interesting Links

https://github.com/zakirullin/gpt-go
https://blog.jetbrains.com/education/2025/07/28/rust-exercises-rustrover/

Tech News

Phew! can we start counting the number of models released this week, this was that was kind of week.

OpenAI releases GPT-OSS (open weight models under Apache 2.0 license)
OpenAI releases GPT 5 chat, mini, nano with and without thinking capabilities
Anthropic drops Claude 4.1
Google’s Genie 3
Horizon Alpha and Beta models on openrouter
OpenAI releases Study mode in ChatGPT and Google releases Guided learning mode in Gemini
Appwrite goes public (generally available)
Google’s Jules AI Agent goes public (generally available)

I think we can say August start week was a huge bag of announcements and model releases.

That’s it from this week! A fun exciting week, not at work, but having fun on the side.

See you in the next one!

Happy Coding :)

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#757th edition) , and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #53

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #53

A pretty slow moving week, but a lot of consumption. I watched and read a lot of resources on SQL, databases and backend in general. I want to understand SQL to learn what is the fundamental unit in CRUD apps, which I think is a SQL query.

Writing SQL query by hand in 2025 might be obsolete, but that 2% or 5% of the queries are pain in the ass to get LLMs write, that’s when the knowledge the depth, the legs of the PI shaped learning helps and make you feel alive, after weeks of existential crisis. I’ll keep learning SQL for the time being.

Admitting that I didn’t push any code to prod this week, it was a bit of struggle for me to get things in shape after loosing touch, I did a ton of debugging, but didn’t push any code. I’ll be honest about it, as there are days where you are just a helping hand or a gazing at the things unfold before you, because it’s ain’t my time or space to do it. Next week, probably will be breaking prod.

Quote of the week

“Without your involvement you can’t succeed. With your involvement you can’t fail.”
— APJ Abdul Kalam

Immerse yourself in the process, because you can’t win without, and the only thing in the way is yourself. I have involved myself in programming completely for 3 years, and have not failed in a literal sense, I have a great job, have good motivation to work towards, yes I made mistakes and continue to learn from them and make more different ones, that’s the process. If you put out, you know, you learn, you get better, the more you put out, the more luck doubles up each time.

Most people get exhausted after the upteenth attempt, but they might be just one more step away from success, success should never be the only goal, if it is, what after you achieve it? The process, the madness to do it, should be, the curiosity that will flicker in the toughest of times will carry the weakest to the peaks and the absence of it can make the strongest tumble down the cliff.

Created

Wrote
- TIL: TMUX Scroll mode select and copy
  - I was in dilemma, I sometimes use Ghostty or default terminal, sometimes with multiple windows, sometimes different tabs, sometimes zellij and sometimes tmux.
  - I just forced myself to use TMUX and ended on the problems or flows that I have been avoiding to fix,failing to find and navigate around like a wizard, but took a few minutes to get the mess out, and here we go.
  - This was just a few key strokes away namely, prefix + [ to enter the scroll mode, Ctrl + Space to enter selection mode, and Enter or Ctrl + J to copy to clipboard. Rock and rolling with log driven debugging.
- Thoughts: Kubernetes isn’t for you
  - I agree to this post, in certain situations. Especially for me if I am starting out in tech, I probably would not give advice to learn Kubernetes. Just get dirty with the normal deployment options, understand the pain points and then switch to K8s or others as needed.
  - This post lists down the points that people use Kubernetes just for bragging or showing that they know what they are doing, or just using it to show that they are cooking. But in reality if you are a small scale team, with couple of services, using Kubernetes makes no sense.
- Thoughts: Just fucking use kubernetes
  - I agreed to this post, too, as I said it depends. If you purpose is to learn Kubernetes, be a DevOps guy, be a SRE, or some cool tech guy, nerding, curios about it, JUST F-ING LEARN KUBERNETES.
  - This post made really good attempts to pull the trigger for me, I’ll quote waylon walker for a giga-chad quote
    “But my App is small, So is you ambition”
  - That just hits home, for me at least. If you think your app is a toy project, you are probably right and wrong, how do you know that if you haven’t deployed yet and people haven’t used it yet.

Read

Overthinking GIS
- This just triggered some neurons in my brains, some horses running. I got a bit of interest in exploring GIS data. Want to play with it, and find interesting details.
- This post highlighted the ways to use GIS data to get the usability of a land, basically which are fertile and usable for farming I think. But the technicality in which it was explained was clicking the right knobs at the right time with the perfect steps and images.
- Would be certainly writing a post in this style sometimes soon.
HTTP VS Websockets: The breakthrough moment that clicked
- Such a honest, humble and insightful post. HTTP as a delivery truck, Websockets as a telephone! Such a relatable example, this shows the author got it right and is able to connect it well.
- I can’t agree more to this tip
  Try building a tiny app with both. Make a little dashboard that gets real time updates on something simple like stock prices or server load. Build one with HTTP polling. Build one with WebSockets. You will feel the difference, not just see it.
- Back when I was a freshman in college, I tried doing this kind of thing for my world atlas chat app game, and failed badly, calling database for each message to send over the HTTP, what a idiot I was, but then, google searched about this and found plethora of articles about websockets and what not.
- While making that, I realised the pain points getting solved with websockets and everything just clicked.
More than Code
- Reading code in the age of AI, is gold and the only thing I think people spend most of the time, with other being vibe-debugging which might be fair less then vibe-reading.
- Reading code should become like instinct, just by gazing, you should be able to smell bad code and sniff the bugs out. This is not easy, it comes with practise and years of slog-debugging, first debugging the human code then go to vibe-debugging.
Learning GRPC Completely in Golang
- This explains what GRPC, protocol-buffers and the connecting technologies behind them in Golang.
- This gives a great overview of what and how the APIs are created.
Death by AI
- Woah! AI Overview mode in Google is terse at certain things. But for programming, I think it works a charm 95% of the times. yes there are pretty bad hallucinations too due to reddit and slop debates.
- Haven’t thought that it would mistaken a person with other person’s name and call it dead! Hillarious.
Why I do programming
For me, programming has always been more than a skill. It’s a way to explore, to tinker, and to satisfy curiosity.
- This is what programming is about, using curiosity to find the solutions to the problems. Curiosity is like a fire that keeps you warm in the winter.
Why GenAI Infrastructure feels backward
- I agree to this, this post can’t read this entire thing, but can understand the point of view
- Python and Javascript seems to be taking the forefront in the infrastructure side of things. All AI-Labs first launch SDKs and Packages for these two ecosystems, but never the others which are suited for them like Go or Rust.
- It’s time to change and make a difference in this revolution.
What are JSON Web tokens (JWT)
- Find me a better JWT tutorial then this, I’ll wait.
- Explained the problem then developed the intuition for the reason why JWTs exist. Very well explained, detailed and the diagram made it perfect for visualising the flow. It also mentioned the best practises, ticking all the boxes for a great article.
- Must read for beginner getting to understand JWT Authentication after learning Session based authentication.

Watched

Anatomy of a Request: A deep dive of a http request processing from the Backend side
- Woah! That is a ton of computation.
- On Client: Creating the payload, encryption (write copy), loading in kernel space, sending the data
- On backend: Received the data, reading to the user space, decryption, decoding (serialization) of the body.
- So many steps are there, the speaker rightly said, its a fascinating field, the more you go deeper, the more stuff is there to explore and learn.

Writing a Text Editor - Computerphile
- Interesting that text editors use Gap buffers. Its like a temporary register (block of memory) used to append text characters while the user edits (adds) to the file and then it gets saved, the remaining empty part is truncated. Clever data structure.
- He explained it so nicely, the approach, the problem and then a new intuition, again a limitation, then a proper intuition.
- Vi uses linked linked like data structure for editing, very interesting.

Why do databases store data in B+ Trees
- Everything is about intuition it seems, you see a problem, you think for a while, you think of a ideal scenario and you just scramble up a solution by adding the good parts and discarding the bad parts.
- This was the same, for why database use B+ Trees. Because we need to optimise for any arbitrary access for data as well as for range queries.

SQLite: How it works: Richard Hipp
- What a banger of a presentation and talk. Explained so much, in depth, in such a short time. It helped me understand what SQLite actually is, it’s a parser + virtual machine to run the core part and basically the fopen function in C to actually perform the operation.
- One unique insight here is
  - Reading 10 files content from disk is slower than reading those file contents from SQLite
  - Why? Because the database file is opened once and the reading happens in that instance only, data is stored in pages (fragments of memory), so it’s just a matter of reading bytes at a specific order.
  - But reading 10 different files on disk will make you use fopen 10 times, and that is slow!
  - 200 IQ move from SQLite team, have never seen such a beautiful solution to almost all the problems in the data world.

The real reason you can’t get a job
- More work, more luck
- Curiosity to learn, outperforms desperation to get money

Simple Joy of programming Course announcement
- It’s a great commitment to teaching the fundamentals.
- Not just fundamentals but building on top of the strong foundation.

Sync Engines and Local Data: Discussion of different database sync providers
- This actually made me a bit curious about sync engines further. I was in confusion when I heard about it from Theo as he used it for T3 chat. It didn’t made sense at that time. It still doesn’t, as why syncing is required in a chat app, all the data comes from the backend, there is no processing on the frontend?

Learnt

Getting into scroll mode in TMUX, selecting text and copying with vi-like keybindings.

You can’t do a unpacking in a sql query when using nested query for more than one column returned

Like example i have a query like this

SELECT 
  s.id, 
  s.package_id,
  address_id, 
  a.address AS from_address, 
  (
    SELECT 
      address,
    FROM 
      addresses 
    WHERE 
      id = p.to_address_id
  ) AS to_address 
FROM 
  scans AS s 
  INNER JOIN packages AS p ON p.id = s.package_id 
  INNER JOIN addresses AS a on a.id = p.from_address_id;

But let’s say for some reason I wanted to also get the to_address_type like a column from the addresses table

You might try to over-optimise the queries and try something like this

SELECT 
  s.id, 
  s.package_id, 
  action, 
  contents, 
  address_id, 
  a.address AS from_address, 
  (
    SELECT 
      address, 
      type 
    FROM 
      addresses 
    WHERE 
      id = p.to_address_id
  ) AS (to_address, to_address_type) 
FROM 
  scans AS s 
  INNER JOIN packages AS p ON p.id = s.package_id 
  INNER JOIN addresses AS a on a.id = p.from_address_id 
WHERE 
  address = '900 Somerville Avenue' 
  AND s.action = 'Drop';

And ERROR, you can’t do that

This bit right here

(SELECT address, type FROM addresses WHERE id=p.to_address_id)
AS
(to_address, to_address_type)

This is not feasible in SQL, you can’t unpack multiple columns from a subquery directly and alias them inline in a single SELECT clause.
Well I have to do it this way then, duhh

SELECT 
  s.id, 
  s.package_id, 
  action, 
  contents, 
  address_id, 
  a.address AS from_address, 
  (
    SELECT 
      address 
    FROM 
      addresses 
    WHERE 
      id = p.to_address_id
  ) AS to_address, 
  (
    SELECT 
      type 
    FROM 
      addresses 
    WHERE 
      id = p.to_address_id
  ) AS to_address_type 
FROM 
  scans AS s 
  INNER JOIN packages AS p ON p.id = s.package_id 
  INNER JOIN addresses AS a on a.id = p.from_address_id

What a long query!
By the way, this is one of the questions in CS50 SQL Problem set 1 packages section.
Any better way to do this? drop them in the comments or hit me up on my socials, will be completing more challenges this weekend.

Tech News

Google Gemini 2.5 Deep Thinking mode on app
- This looks something interesting, Google keeps pushing the boundaries for what LLMs are capable and making it more accessible.
NotebookLM launches Video overview mode for notebooks summaries
- This is a good feature, not great! I tried it and it’s decent, cuts in between, just text and arrows matched up like a presentation deck for the given problem. Not much value for a deeper dive, but really great to get a gist and overview.
- I can see this being used for news aggregation or summarising things from a lots of similar sources.
ZAI release GLM 4.5
- Another chinese model that is a serious contender for coding or general purpose tasks. That too local and open source models.
Qwen releases 3rd version of Instruct, Thinking and Coder models
- They launched quite a few variations, 235B for thinking and instruct
- Also 480 and 30 Billion variant for the Coder model
POE introduces the API for AI Models
- I have used POE in the past, and this looks like a great addition to test out a few SOTA models for free with some limitations via the API.

Phew! a lot of open source models are cooking! Everything is intuition and curiosity, and AI is still a thing to wrap our heads around, but the fundamentals are the same.

See you in the next one!

Happy Coding :)

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#756th edition) , and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #52

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #52

Finally a rewarding week, after 2 week of slogs. I / We were able to make the client happy after having gone through hundreds of issues and wired experiments. I was involved when the bug was introduced, but I had clarified that is this what we want, and at that time the answer was yes! Still in the end I was the one biting teeth and on the burn.

Anyways, at least the problem got solved and we were saved.

I read a ton about SQL and SQLite this week. Want to more this week too. I have a few ideas and issues that I am finding interest to work towards and finally at the end of the week or weekend will have something to share.

I am considering a mini series of SQL tib-bits, not a thoughtful things, but have something in mind over the month.

Ops! almost missed it, it’s week #52, that is, one year anniversary of Techstructive Weekly. I can’t believe that. I just kept writing and here we are with 50 weeks of constant reflection and hitting the publish button.

I am not going to stop this, instead I fancy myself writing more over the months and years, because some has said it.

Writing is thinking and thinking is writing.

There might be 104th edition of this newsletter with nothing new, maybe it will be completely changed, who knows what the future holds, but one thing is certain, something will change in me because of this. A hope, and not a false one.

Quote of the week

"A year from now you may wish you had started today."
— Karen Lamb

I don’t regret even a slightest that I started writing this weekly a year back. I learnt to articulate better, knew things I forget in a day or two. Helped me organise my learning and reading resources, be mindful about the media that I consume, helped me get over the blank page fear and most importantly helped me cultivate the reflective mindset rather than what next. Because this period when I write this is important for planing and thinking next what to do.

So, what is something I wish I would do now?

Log the things and observations about LLMs and different models or even versions. Different techniques about coding with LLMs that work and don’t work
Monthly Open source contribution reflections
Daily Work log (private google doc) inspired from Arpit’s ritual

Will I be able to do all? Probably not, but even something better at the end of the year.

Read

Here are some of the articles and tid-bits around the internet I read in this week:

SQLite Internals: Pages and B-Trees
1. This is quite interesting and helpful in making things clear
2. Every piece of data is stored in pages, a page is the unit of data in SQLite. Each page has parts like divided each for storing its metadata and the actual data.
3. Each type has certain number of bytes to be stored, so there is a identifier for that, so it makes retrieval and storing efficient.
How I keep up with AI progress and you should too
1. Simon Wilson, Andrej Karapathy and official sources are quite the right streams of sources for learning and keeping up with AI and tech in general.
2. These people are really hands-on and have a decades of experience and wisdom.
Rickrolling Turso
1. Avi has been hacking on Turso, he is a database nerd.
2. This was a fun way to demonstrate how to hack into a rust database, sqlite internals.
Why LLMs struggle with analytics, and how tinybird solve it
It ain’t about generating perfect queries, its about getting insights about data.
1. That’s a great way to put it.
2. With LLM context is really important and especially for critical things like database queries. Passing only the relevant info and cutting the fluff out is the key, but executing SQL queries in itself is that problem for the analyser.
3. So LLM is just solving that step but for writing the actual query from the natural language.
Simon Wilson’s commentary on GitHub Spark
1. As per this and more experimentation, it could be said Spark is the most competent and well engineered AI Assisted Code Environment.
2. Why? Because it’s GitHub, it has integrated the LLM in such a way that it seamlessly blends with GitHub Actions, Pages, Repositories, Secrets and Environments, Google had a great chance with FireStudio, but failed there.
3. GitHub seems to have taken a better and more engineered approach and not rushed it.
The Business case for Vanilla JS
1. Just write plain javascript and shut it up. Why are we really bottling ourselves with the gazillions of frameworks and mental load of understanding each other’s semantics and constraints and styles.
2. Why is there a need to create abstraction on top of abstractions. I get it, that writing javascript is cubersome each time. But the amount of abstraction and the cost of it adds is wild. We have a separate steps and ecosystem for doing just these, man!
Memcached Architecture
1. Simple and straightforward explanation of the memcache
2. Simple in-memory key-value store with slab-based memory management to avoid fragmentation. It has a threaded architecture and per-slab LRU for efficient concurrency and eviction, Also client-managed sharding enables distributed caching without server communication.
Rate Limiting explained in 252 words
how many requests a user or client can make in a given period
And not control of how much a user can consume over a longer period

Watched

Some random youtube video I watched at night after work during the week and weekends:

DHH on Lex Fridman Podcast
- So many hot takes and might change my perspective on software engineering
- Simplify development is important than elegance, eg. Ruby over Python, SQL over ORMs
- Using editor to chisel out code, and not let AI rip it.
- Finally someone to speak about the craft of coding, the fun of writing code alone, in the darkness, letting us spare time and let us cook.
- Engineering managers are meaningless for startups.

SQLite’s WAL Mode is faster than DELETE Mode
- This is so well explained, first showed everything what each one is and then the benchmark just makes everything clear.
- The WAL mode basically writes the changes in a separate file and merges to the original db file whenever required, hence there is no overhead when reading or writing multiple writers or readers.
- The delete mode is like a backup, a journal, it keeps pages of the data that are to be changed and after it is committed it deletes the file, that clearly looks slow.

Learnt

A few things I learnt while at my work and majorly side-questing after work:

DUAL Table in Oracle and MySQL Databases
- Dual is like a dummy table that you can reference in Oracle or MySQL databases as in these databases you cannot use query without a `FROM` clause.
- So `FROM` clause is requried, and hence the dummy table is needed to satisfy that quirky semantic of those databases.
SQL Sequence table
- The `sqlite_sequence` table is internal table that helps sqlite keep track of the auto increment counter for each table’s primary key.
- It has 2 columns, name containing the name of the table and `seq` denoting the max value of the id (auto-increment value), usually the last inserted id of the row in the table.
- Key things to note are:
  - Only one entry for each table, so this will only create the entry for the table if it has a integer primary key with auto-increment constraint.
  - If you change it manually, SQLite will still select the max of the row primary key by getting the full-scan on that table.

Tech News

Some of the things happening in tech, hot and smoking.

Qwen-3 Coder: It seems we have now a whole bunch of terminal based ai code war. Claude Code, Codex (does anyone use it?), Warp, Ampcode, Gemini CLI, now Qwen.
GitHub releases Spark for public preview: This looks solid and well engineered product, will be trying out this weekend, finger crossed, will get time and will be streaming it.
Google is testing an vibe coding app called Opal: Another one. We have no shortage of these, Firebase Studio, Lovable, V0, Bolt, and what nots.

I’ll leave you here, it’s been a great week atleast on the learning side, should be more fun next week and over the weekend.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#755th edition) , and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #51

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #51

Another hectic week, the work seems unstoppable and almost killing my back. Had to work almost 12 hours at stretch to get something in production. Not the best of times to be working at. Especially when life puts you in wired position, not just in work but in mental situation, you have to believe in yourself and amidst that every other bit of things happen.

Random Thought

I was working away some bugs and fixing issues which was created for some other purpose at the time of initial prototype. But as the time evolved, it changed and deviated from the initial purpose, so fixed the current problem at hand. But people then point out your decisions. I felt grieved, lost, and most importantly wrong. But then things clarify, working all the possibilities of blunder out. Only problem was the decision made by the person in front of me when I asked the question in the past. But it was my fault in the end today. Not blaming anyone, just letting my thoughts out that people are too quick to judge and blame you when things go wrong rather than clarifying what they discussed first. World is cruel for the symphatic, for the humble, for the kind. It’s just is life. Can’t do much. But will you with one inspiration if you are lashed out at and the tides are against you.

Crying is never a sign of your grief, its a sign that you are alive right from your birth.

Is it okay to cry? Probably yes, but don’t feel guilt and shame in crying out, cry alone but wipe out the tears and move on. At the end its only you who have to wipe your own tears, there are people who are around you who care, but crying in front of them might make them sad that’s what you would think. I too think that and cry alone. The journey is lonely, there are people that will help you, guide you, love you but in the end you need to put your foot ahead and walk yourself.

Quote of the week

“The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.”
— Robert Jordan, The Fires of Heaven

Such a great quote to describe my situation right now. I am just bowing down, accepting the flaws but not the things that were not mine. Just letting go of things, and let life show its wrath or the good behind the bad its happening. Because I can confidently say, every storm ends with a new beginning and there are definitely some things that flourish after the storm but some do get weathered out due to resistance.

Read

How I do it - Daniel Stenberg(Creator and Maintainer of cURL)
1. Such an honest and encouraging post. It shows how a single curiosity, a fun project can become a livelihood for someone or many people.
2. He has made his curiosity take direction and kindled it with consistency.
3. He also without shame and guilt admits the truth about maintaining a project or even working at something for quite a few years or even half a decade. Commendable spirit.
  First let’s not pretend that it always feels fun and thrilling. Sometimes it actually feels a bit boring and done. There is no shame in that and it is not strange or odd. Such periods come and go. When they come, I might do less curl for a while. Or maybe find a corner of the project that is not important but could be fun to poke at. I have learned that these periods come and go.
Reflections on OpenAI
1. A good type of post actually. Very rarely I have seen people reflect back on the company they worked and detailed the things he learnt and felt at the company without brag or hype especially for a company like OpenAI
2. Everyone does a post where they talk about where they want to go next, or just complain about the things that made them leave the org. An important distinction for this post.
3. It seem fascinating how bold and achieved is OpenAI, the risk and rewards had been blessed to OpenAI it seems, I am not saying they have not worked hard, just that it could have gone worse, if ChatGPT didn’t pick up.
Kubernetes is not just for Black Fridays
1. I mean this is correct, I don’t want to deny this. Having a dependable system that scales is a good thing, instead of hacking a script or a pipeline for deployment or CI, creating a heavy yet robust system is worth it.
2. However, the only counterpoint I have is how you learn the things that the larger system does without using each component at its core.
The great SQLite rewrite
1. It is a serious thing.
2. People at Turso are seriously building it, it’s not a honey pot, last week I think they rewarded a thousand or more money to a person who actually found a bug in the Turso Rust version.

Watched

Philosophy is the last subject worth learning and studying amidst the AI hype
- This might look like off-topic, but it really is relatable and worth thinking about
- If you think, AI can do everything, what is there that makes human live?
- What makes humans, human? the communication, the art, the craft, the way to express ideas? IF so why are we in a race to get that replaced with AI
- So, he clearly distinguished the two things like theoretical and philosophical things. The former might be replaced by AI, but the later is the crux of what makes humans, human.
- Worth thinking and reflecting upon if you are getting anxiety as a person with the new LLMs launching every day.

Learnt

SQLC Issue with PostgreSQL Aggregate types
- I was just trying to get back into open-source, just to distract myself and gain the lost fun back in programming especially after hard times at work.
- I scampered through the issue list at sqlc and found this bug that caught me and wanted to fix.
- Reproduced the issue, gave the filestructure to GPT, Claude and Grok and it gave me a few files that I could look for and find the bug after log slog and print debugging.
- I reached a point after a few hours of interrupted debugging for a couple of days and found the core part where it misses the type.
- There is no type inference done for the return type of the aggregate function having multiple schema type, the table schema is not being passed to the function that does it, so it just picks up the first map.
Completed SQL Bolt course tutorial
- Completed all the 18 exercises of the learning SQL starter guide on SQL Bolt
- Learned a lot of interesting quirks about LEFT JOIN and RIGHT and NATURAL JOIN being only present with LEFT JOIN in the sqlite js with the wasm compatible in the browser.

Tech News

Kimi AI K2: This is probably the largest open weights model out in the wild, and that too probably the first that is really beating the state of the art models in tool calling and agentic coding. A huge standard leveller for open source community. There are quirks about the license but its pretty commendable in terms of what they have achieved.
Kiro IDE: Amazon out of thin air just blew this up. Its almost like Cursor but with more controlled and flexible using preferences. It almost forces developers to plan and thoroughly consider the most tedious and boring part (sometimes the most exciting) of the development which is defining the problem and listing the features.
Cognition acquires Windsurf: Devin will now use Windsurf, interesting deal this. How on earth are these two even partnering, doesn’t makes sense. At one point it looked they are rivals, even opposite mentality, but somehow they are collaborating now.
ChatGPT releases Agents: This is like a thing that we all knew was coming but is late on the tables. Need to check it out if that is available for free users or not. If yes, then will be quite a fun thing to do and learn.

Didn’t consume much this week, produced a lot of shitty python and probably fixed a tons of bugs, but never got recognition. That’s quite a whirlwind to do, will be taking this weekend a slight self development route to upskill myself for learning SQL. I am finding it really interesting to learn SQL and contribute to SQLC, will continue on that.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#754 edition) , and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Techstructive Weekly #50

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #50

A bit of boring week, had a lot of hopes starting on Monday, but it just tumbled down. Also broke the 15 day long writing streak. It all just falls apart, I want to change things now. I work remotely, and not able to balance work-life and personal life, its just too exhausting. I get self-doubt creep up with this, am I really a sustainable developer, can I not continue development for the next 10 years even? It is starting to haunt me. I know it would be temporary, imposter syndrome feeling, but need to really change the flow of my daily routine to get a mindset shift.

But learnt a lot this week, about SQL continuing from the past week, started solving SQL 50 problems, which I am halfway through. Also need to ramp up my problem solving skills, need to build projects, there is lot of stuff to do. I just get overwhelmed with stuff every time.

I haven’t streamed for the past 3 weeks and it is giving me negative cloud of procrastination. Hopefully will be able to break the jinx this weekend. July has been good to me in the past, hoping for the best again.

Quote of the week

“It’s not about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”
– Rocky Balboa

Yes, I admit I might be hit, I have fallen, I no longer have the motivation to code for some patches of the week. But I have the spark back at times and flash of seconds. It might be a temporary burst of problems at my end, but every storm weathers out, every night ends and that’s when the comeback begins, the sun strikes and light appears, there we see a hope, and the light at the end of the tunnel, it might be small, but enough to keep moving us ahead.

I am willing to change my workflow and routine, I just need to give it some time. If habits are easy to build they are easy to break too. I know this with my 15 day writing streak that I broke, I didn’t had the mental energy to sit and write for an hour, and that’s the reason I am frustrated with my life, with my work. I am adamant to change.

By the end of July the max, the first year anniversary of this newsletter will be special one.

Created

SqueaLite Browser Editor → squealite.vercel.app
- Just wanted a quick and easy way to write SQL queries and test out on a database.
- Turns out sql.js is a great solution for it, it’s a WASM library to interact with SQL in the browser with JS. I am using it to create a database for that session for the user in the browser and let the user use it as a playground database.
- I added (AI-assisted) editor, result panel, multiple query tabs, loading and saving queries and databases, among other visual aided table things.
- Planning to add two more sections
  - Problems → Like leetcode styled run and submit challenges.
  - Exercises → Independent and specific playground for understanding specific concepts.
  - Per user database for playground and exercises using Turso libsql database.
Analogies are not always good: Comparing VACUUM in Postgres with free in C
- Well, this is a off-topic write-up I felt writing because no one seems to have compared VACUUM in Postgres and free in C.
- Those 2 might look unrelated but for understanding it makes a lot of sense. Actually I learnt that VACUUM is not like free, but VACUUM FULL does look like free.
- My point is drawing analogies is good but not when you are not sure of either of them, it could look good on the high level talks, but getting a little deeper will shatter the comparison if not thought carefully.

Read

Tools: Code is all you need
- MCP is not worth the context I think, and this proves it. I have no experience but just from the understanding it would make sense, since a lot of things need to be made clear before using them right?
- Imagine a human navigating this, you will have to make him aware that these are the tools, explain what each tool does and then provide them. But not to a professional, so we can conclude that LLMs are not professionals yet!
- MCP is a bit verbose and might not be right for all kinds of models with less context window or limited capabilities.
Thoughts on motivation and my 40 year-old career
- This was a intense read, a bit of self reflection and some insights into business vs wage job.
- I think engineering is hard to explain by the looks of the post, its a bit of complex thing to be working at, not hard, but you need time and patience to get used to it.
I still care about the code
- This is so well put, LLMs are not compilers or interpreters, they still are unreliable. I mean ~~software is unreliable~~, untested software is unreliable but LLM generated code is on the extreme end of black holes.
- Hallucination is a things, I am not talking about on-surface wrong things, I am talking about deep and little details, that right now only human developers can craft.
How AI is changing the Software Hiring in 2025
- Being low on confidence and not fake ego are so valuable, being humble has never been rarer and rewarding then ever.
Waiting for a Follow-up
- Man, this week, I am reading and watching stuff, almost as I do them, it was the analogy thing, now I am waiting for a follow-up, it ended but still, feeling like I am walking into coincidences right and left this week.
- But true, looking outward helps. It creates a sense of motion and drive us from the overthinking and procrastination that would have consumed and stalled us.
How Cloudflare’s R2 actually works
- It now makes sense that how R2 is ideal for storing and frequently accessing large amounts of binary or media like data.
How to get a job at Canonical
- Care, Attention to detail and skills are quite the standard in any big tech company.
- Interesting and exciting to see Canonical not using AI, at least there is hope.

Watched

Learning Pydantic AI in Marimo
- This was the video of the week, I learnt a lot of stuff. One being, marimo is something I need to try as fast as possible and make it my go to tool for anything prototyping in python.
- The discussion around Agent and LLMs is so beautiful.
- Adding Type_1 | str is so so useful, It just opens up so many possibilities. The entire Agent concept could be made possible due to this.
- Because if you are expecting a type in return but there is no enough information to return, the model has to forcefully return a value which might not be great, by just adding a | str it would then ask the user to fill in the details. Extremely well designed library.

“Software is changing again by Anderj Karapathy” Review by the Primeagen
- Analogies man, they are everywhere.
- Andrej drew a few analogies like OS and Electricity with AI and LLMs, which makes sense but Primeagen rightly said that he could come up with any thing and compare it with anything if he has too, but understanding deeper just breaks the analogies, which was the reason I was writing the before mentioned post, all of this clicked to me.

Why Programs use Stack, Heap and other memory segments
- Now, I got a better understanding of what heap and stack actually means.
- Stack would be useful for quickly adding function calls, and heap for accessing long term variables on the memory which might be fragmented.

Learnt

SQL
- SQLite doesn’t have TRUNCATE
- .read is a handy way of reading sql queries in a shell environment
- CASE WHEN <CONDITION> THEN <value> ELSE <value> END
  - This is the statement I used to filter values in a aggregate functions like COUNT, SUM, etc.
  - Really helpful to know this as it could be used with certain conditions to count specific elements but not for the entire query. Or there are different conditions for each column to get out.
PostgreSQL
- Timestamp and Datetime
  - Use named timezones as far as possible and stick to UTC
  - If you are using both date and timestamp better use datetime
- UUID
  - Are efficient compared to text type
- Integers | Numeric | Floating point
  - Integers are fast, range from 2, 4 and 8 bytes, super accurate and fast
  - Numeric > extremely precise but slower
  - Floating point > fast with a little less precision
- Don’t use money type when dealing with money

Tech News

XAI releases Grok 4: The model is the smartest model to date, and also the most expensive. Interesting quirk is that, if you ask for its opinions, it dials up Elon Musk’s Tweets to find his opinion. Wired quirk but maybe *unintentional*
Cursor Pricing drama: Cursor just updated / clarified their pricing for the individual plan and being costing a bit high for unlimited usage.
Mistral updates the Devstral (Coding LLM) small and medium variants: This makes the Local Coding model race a bit heated, as Devstral Small stands neck to neck with Gemini and GPT 4.1 models.
Perplexity launches Comet browser: Now AI is getting into everything. I am not sure when this will end. People are just too eager to cram AI in the silliest of things.

As expected, there was a model release this week, if you have been following the trend, we are nearly getting a new model every two weeks. And for the past two weeks, there was no major model drop and this was anticipated. Next week Open AI might be cooking something.

That’s it from the week 50, we are close on the one year anniversary of this newsletter. Wow! a whole year has been gone in writing these newsletters, didn’t expect it to be that quick.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#753 edition) , and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Techstructive Weekly #49

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #49

I’ll keep this week short, I have a lot to learn, and too little time. I have been studying SQL in detail, practising problem sets over the week. Taking a few more courses on Redis, Python, and more SQL.

One interesting thing, I kept on with my creative writing endeavour and made 14 days streak, writing with an average of 1200 words a day. So, I am roughly at 20k words after 15 days on my novel. This could be my first novel, could be even ready by the end of July if I keep going after it. Sounds exciting to me. Can’t wait to complete it.

I also want to create a weekly wrap-up and learning for SQL. I am really ready to dive deeper into the database world. I think this is what I can master and become a depth-first person for Databases and SQL.

Quote of the week

“Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

I kept on writing my novel, one hour each day, I had no idea about the whole story, just kept a timer and no distractions, ideas flew after a while and the word count reached 1k, that momentum is enough to carry it ahead and continue the story next day and the day after, just like the mind has been stretched and formed with new ideas and uncharted water. Here imagination and curiosity take control and it feels so empowering and refreshing to discover that something existed within but never tapped.

Keep your mind open to new ideas, experiment, and you never know something will click like a light bulb and could change your life forever.

Read

Which LLM writes the best analytical SQL
- This was a great tutorial. It highlighted the point that “SQL is still a skill”. LLMs can generate SQL, but not analytical and efficient queries yet.
- The cost is a factor, but right now it seems not worth it.
- I thought LLMs were replacing people writing SQL, but here we are still requiring the domain experts. The people who will roll up the sleeve and press CAPs Lock and head to write SQL.
- GPT models are decent in a balance of latency with accuracy, then comes Claude with high accuracy but slight slow, Gemini is good, especially the Pro, but takes time, the flash models are bad with faster times.
- So, the LLMs are not perfect yet, they might get a few years time down the road, but it looks far from now.
How long context fails
- This was an insightful observation, must know things before working with LLMs having a large context window, or even a short for that matter.
- The needle in the haystack problem is not solved, and LLMs are very sensitive to getting up in a rabbit hole.
  - Context Poisoning
  - Context Distraction
  - Context Confusion
  - Context Clash
- All of these reasons look the same, but can mean different things in different “CONTEXT”.
How we accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube
- This is hilariously funny.
- They trained the model on a corpus of YouTube videos, because sometimes, text and images aren’t enough for these kinds of operations like robotics, where moments are essential for learning and iteration
Claude Code is my Computer
- I see this with many developers, not just newbies or just soydevs, but also veteran and knowledgeable developers, too. They seem to have a liking towards Claude code.
- I know the feeling I think after using Amp, Warp, Gemini CLI to some extent.
- But this is a bit of avoiding the chores part, which is fine.
Just fucking use Kubernetes
- This article is true and motivating to learn Kubernetes
- I read an article which was the opposite of this, not in a bad way, just a way of presenting the idea to keep it simple and avoid the complexity if not needed.
- This article, however, is a motivator in a couple of sense, first it says if you think the scale is low, your ambitions are low. What a statement.
- And also it’s an under kill if you think Kubernetes is an overkill
- Nice AI-generated slop, actually is good.
Writing code was never the bottleneck
- Yes, code was never the bottleneck, but it was not also the easiest thing. People plan and plan, and plan more, but the execution is not up the mark, and the planning was of no use. Coding is neglected among managers but empathy is needed to bridge the gap.
Why I want to write again
- I also want to write again. It has been almost a year since I started this newsletter, and I have not been able to break into a habit of writing the blogs that I used to back then.
- The author’s claims are so true, and I can’t agree more, but the habit is the key part that holds me back. There is never a smooth life; something or the other hinders the focus.

Watched

Understanding B Trees: The data structure behind databases
- This was super cool, the way it was visualized and taught.
- I adore Brain Yu, he is a master teacher. I learnt Python and Django from him.
- B-trees are basically trees with an equal number of leaf nodes. No unbalanced roots. The operations to make the insertion and deletion made it really awesome for understanding.

Agentic Coding: The future of software development with agents
- See, again, Claude's code and agentic tools are getting adorned by experienced developers too. This is the thing that makes me concerned about my own opinion and thoughts.
- It surely is powerful but it hasn’t clicked for me yet I think.

Vercel Finally Caught up
- Vercel now makes you pay for only the CPU usage and not the time.
- Still expensive from Cloudflare but a good dip in the number

I finally switched to PostgreSQL
- Planetscale just added PostgreSQL as a supported database
- Convex now switched to PostgreSQL
- So, convex becomes a free tier for Postgres on Planetscale

CS50 SQL Lectures Playlist
- I am learning SQL with this playlist, its in depth and also has a problem set to explore on our own.
- I have completed watching all the videos and just yesterday completed problem set 1, will be moving on to solving more.

Learnt

SQL
- Nested Queries
  - With this we can use select and that result set becomes a value for a condition for the outer select that is handy
  - = for single value and IN for range of values(list)
- JOINS
  - INNER JOINS are only for matching records between two tables
  - LEFT JOIN will join everything on the left (first) table, even if there is no matching record on the right
  - RIGHT JOIN will join everything on the right (second) table even if there is no matching record on the left
  - FULL JOIN will join both tables, populating the NULL values if either of them doesn’t match.
  - NATURAL JOIN is the most unnatural part of joins which will combine the tables with the common named column(s) and remove the duplicate column
- VIEWS
  - This is so cool. We can basically create this for reducing redundancy, Its like a macro, a stored function kind of thing, where it doesn’t have memory of its own but has things that it can run on existing data. Super useful to know

Tech News

A week a bit of no new models, nothing fancy launches. Finally, we get a week or two before it gets wild. It’s time to reflect and build something meaningful. It’s time to learn and plant the seeds that will help in the future.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public, so feel free to share it.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#753 edition) , and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Techstructive Weekly #48

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #48

An fruitful week, not much on tech created, but a lot of learning and revising about the first principal thinking.

I tried to create a Pocket clone in Typescript with some AI-assisted (a bit of vibe coding) because I don’t like writing frontend. I failed a few times, and even my network seems to be off for a while, so I had to scrape that idea and stop streaming for the weekend. So, it didn’t quite work out. Instead this weekend I’ll only stream on Saturday to start one project.

I read and consumed a lot of stuff this week. I need to be creating and writing more too. The balance is essential.

I will share one small achievement and progress on my non-tech journey. I wrote 8,000 words approximately on one my Novel (or novella I don’t know yet). I wrote consistently for a week, 1 hour every day, averaging of 1200 words per day. A good start I think, better late then never. I have been procrastinating this for quite some time, in terms of years now. Finally Friday, 20th June 2025 was the day I beat that devil and my hear finally won. It looks small, on the out, but I think this is a start of something big. A turn that I want to remember when I reflect back on my life.

Quote of the week

“The thing that you are most resisting is probably the thing you most need to do.”
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

I have read the book, the war of art, and this quote speaks to me like fire. Something has resisted me from getting into fantasy and creative writing. But here I am after a week of writing consistently. I feel liberated and joyed. There is so much to do, too little time, too many pages to fill, too many characters to paint, too many stories to tell and most importantly so many lives to be kindled with writing.

Created

LLM plugin for code agent with Code toolbox
Tried to create a reader app for collecting and reading articles or content
- Like Mozilla’s Pocket, but focused on reading individual as well collected resources in a simplified interface, distraction free reading
- I get a lot of articles to read, sometimes, I get lost in between tabs and to be read articles, so I wanted to create a simple that lets me dump links to it and later I can skim through them for reading with a simple interface for reading.

Read

Pheonix. new Fly’s entry for AI coding agents
- This is a neat little thing from fly.io, they have made everything so right, that these AI Agents just fit perfectly in their ecosystem.
Using AI right now: A quick guide
- Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude these are the most widely adopted LLMs which are quite general purpose. But they also have nuanced quirks and preferences for certain tasks.
- Deep Research is a big deal and it has helped me learn a new concept every day. I use Grok AI, Gemini AI, Chat GPT and even mistral ai for specific things.
- Hallucinations are no longer a big deal in AI, they have reduced considerably over the years. It is still a problem but not what it used to be.
SQL Join flavors
- This was a insightful post, it helped me feed my hunger for learning more about SQL.
- The qualified, natural (Actually unnatural) and cross broad range of joins really helped understand the concepts better.
- The interactive examples are really great for those types of complex yet powerful concepts.
AI-free Writing
- Anton won’t use AI for writing, I am on his side. I write this newsletter and any writing for that matter without GPT or AI. Yes, I use it as a critique and help me understand how it reads, I read its thoughts and think and leave them. Next time, I be a little considerate about those mistakes.
Golang 1.25 interactive tour
- The json v2 package and the in-depth explanations are helpful in quick understanding of the changes. It has given me a good view on what is changing and is enough motivation for me to tinker on my own and create other examples.
Anatomy of a SQL Engine: Dolthub Blog
- This was a interesting post. It made me curious how a sql statement query is executed, the ast construction, then right recursive and left recursive. This blog actually made me take a in-depth guide on SQL.
- I have started reading about SQL and solving leetcode problems and even some problems on SQLBolt. I have even picked up reading “Learning SQL” Book for learning more. I want to get into “Database Internals”, that book is about how under-the-hood sql and databases work, for that I need to learn what SQL is in the first place.
Docker launches hardened base images
- DHI are the new thing in docker, they help in avoiding the image bloat.
- They are not just trimmed-down versions of existing containers, they’re built from the ground up which is really interesting to work with and help optimise the build process as well as deployment constraints.
Docker Hardened Images start with a dramatically reduced attack surface, up to 95% smaller, to limit exposure from the outset.
Kubernetes isn’t for you
- Kubernetes is made for the scale of google, where they have millions, billions of request per minute. Not for your 100 user startup. True, if the scale keep growing, or you have micro-service architecture, but if you have a bare-bones project and not many user-base, then sticking to simple traditional deployment is good enough
- I hate when people use shiny things for making themselves look like they know what they are doing, the soy devs, the gigachad 100x developers, and they only know what a pod actually means in a cluster.
- Why make things complex, it feels great at first for our egoistic brain, but believe me the complexity will hurt you in the long run. Maybe it will save you too if you are actually growing at scale. But the trade-off you need to decide.
Gemini CLI breakdown by Simon Wilson
- Google has really taken the time to build something of high-enough standard in the space of AI Agents in the terminal. This is a serious competition to Claude Code.
- I wonder what OpenAI missed with Codex. It just is bad. Not even usable to free users, which Google just took it by storm.
- The system prompt is really insightful, the tools are nicely laid out, its so simple yet well architectured.
Now might be the best time to learn software development
- The best time to learn software development was 5 years ago, now is the next best time to learn it.

Watched

How did they get their first Jobs
- Teej had some serious advice, having cover letters, showing that you care is so valuable. I have started to do that (oops, I am looking for a job actively, trying to get a switch after a year and half at my current company)
- Prime had a good take, it just happened to him after he had worked and seriously worked hard enough. He was just doing his best and suddenly luck gave him a chance and he took it with both hands.
- The other person, forgot the name. Also had a symphatical journey.
Cloudflare Containers
- Containers they are really a game changer. Cloudflare does things and does it on scale. This hits different. This is some serious stuff, maybe even a revolution in how we use and build software. It literally can spin up a new computer on the cloud.

Sam Altman on AGI, GPT-5 and other stuff on the Open AI Podcast
- This is all nice and good on the talk, they really need to answer why the heck are they even developing the models and selling them.
- I think the bubble is slowly going to burst and we are going to use AI surely but not the way we are thinking right now. Just as a tool.
- Maybe search will be revolutionised with AI, but I don’t see it in other places, it’s not worth the time and money.

Gemini CLI and comparison with other Agentic Terminal Agents
- Gemini CLI is really nice, at least for a free tier. I can use it and understand the LLMs capabilities. It helps junior developers get a taste of the software AI can produce, but these can really get double edged sword. Juniors will only produce AI slop and never learn anything.
- But yes, google is trying hard to make developers happy for now.

Learnt

Javascript has quirky behaviour with null, undefined and what equality operator
- We don’t know if the value is null or undefined, the object might be still undefined but it will be a truthy value
- The equality operator is very wired, this teaches us that too much flexibility is also bad
  - For instance, the ‘5’ == 5 will be true but ‘5’ === 5 won’t be
  - The triple equal is a type check whereas the double equal is a value check after type casting, which might be a bit unpredictable as the data gets complex.
Getting the unique elements from a list in Python without changing the order
- After python 3.7 changes the dictionary, the order of the keys inserted is maintained, so we can use that to create a map of the elements in the list as a key in the dictionary and return the unique elements.
- Neat little trick, could be well often be used widely in many cases.
```
# this might change the order
list(set(queue))

# this will preserve the order
# works for python > 3.7 
list(dict.fromkeys(queue))
```
Reference: Python Coding Stack: I want to remove duplicates from a python list

The Python Coding Stack

I Want to Remove Duplicates from a Python List • How Do I Do It?

Another short article today to figure out ways to remove duplicate values from a list. The ideal solution depends on what you really need…

7 months ago · 18 likes · 6 comments · Stephen Gruppetta

Tech News

Cloudflare Launches Containers
PNG is back with a new standard for APNG (gif like format)
Google drops Gemini CLI as a terminal AI Agent
Anthropic allows build, host, and share interactive AI-powered apps directly in the Claude app

There are lot of things happening for tooling around these LLMs, no model launches hopefully for a few weeks. But the launches from Google are just not stopping, constant in the news. Anthropic is now trying to expand in different directions after anchoring their flagship model.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#752 edition) , and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Techstructive Weekly #47

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #47

It was a exciting and exhaustive week, in a good way. I was able to almost complete a working AI Chatbot Application, start writing routine for an hour, get inspiration for more project ideas, and a lot of learning in tid-bits around LLMs.

This can’t be more exciting. A week or two before I was drenched in anxiety and negativity around LLMs as replacement for developers, but that’s far from reality and considering them as tools sounds so fun. I feel excited so much so that I feel I have no time to squeeze the energy.

This weekend I was not able to livestream and record any videos due to network issues and also I had a bit of cold. This week hopefully will be doing 2 3-hour live streams on creating projects.

Mozilla Firefox’s Pocket clone
LiteLLM Implementation in Golang

Not both of them, either of them will be working this weekend.

I haven’t created any videos, haven’t planned any video as of yet, but have a lot of ideas for writing. I think I will be creating a timer based blog writing, I have to force myself to write a blog. I have lost too many months writing a blog, can’t lose them anymore.

Quote of the week

“AI is thinking faster, so we need to think slow”
— I can’t find who quoted this, but I read it somewhere

This is such a great quote, whoever quoted it, awesome job. AI is producing slop and hit sometimes, it might not be correct every time, since perfection is the enemy of progress. So is math, thinking a problem for LLMs currently, they think a lot, hard, too hard at times, and spiral into overthinking just like humans, but meaningless and not required from machines.

We humans are so funny, we expect LLMs to work perfectly but have trained on the dataset that is imperfect.

We need to sift through the LLMs response, which could be slop or a gem, which ever it is, we need to think a bit slow than what it gave. Reflection is key in the case of AI-assisted anything.

Created

Bring Your Own Keys AI Chat App (BYOK AI Chat)
- GitHub Link: https://github.com/Mr-Destructive/byok-ai-chat
- Vibe Coded the Frontend with Lovable / Windsurf
- Half baked backend API with Claude and Grok AI
- Minor Improvements and Bug Fixes with Jules Agent
- Backend in Python (FastAPI), PostgreSQL Database
- Frontend with React
- Vercel + Render Deployment
- LiteLLM for model provider
- Yet to add proper authentication (probably with Clerk)

Read

The art of saying no: This post is so accurate in describing the feeling while doing AI assisted development. We have to constantly sift through hundreds of suggestions or ideas to get the one that we are looking for, and that is not easy and comforting at first. However, just like debugging intuitively, accepting suggestions and vibing would become a intuition based activity, it just takes a few misses and hits, some trials and explorations of how these LLMs work.
Never Just: This is absolutely relatable, when we are in complex problem solving situation, and someone says “why don’t we just make it simple”. The person saying this either doesn’t know the problem or knows too much that he simply can do it instead of asking it to others. If this just comes from the surface, it feels a bit hurting, it should be reframed to make it more informative and actionable instead of attacking.
A Linear Algebra Trick for computing Fibonacci Numbers Fast: An interesting way to compute Fibonacci numbers. A nice matrix multiplication trick.
A tale of two Claudes: A completely honest and realistic take.
1. Claude cannot work with Tailwind 4
2. Claude works well with compiler and gnarly debugging memory related issues
3. This is really cool to be aware of, we can use LLMs to guide us in the situations when we are not sure. Because it will speed things up and probably reach conclusions much faster and we can then decide if that conclusion was right or not, rather than spending hours in the gnarly bugs.
4. Someone said it, LLMs are thinking too fast, so we should think slow, what a perfect sentence.
Feedback is not attack: Feedback is quite a huge subject and can affect one’s relation in positive or negative way. Its not just about giving feedback, its also about empathy and being able to receive and accept the feedback well.
What would Kubernetes 2.0 be like: YAML should be replaced with HCL, that is a golden point. No like seriously, reading a long yaml file just gives me headache. I prefer JSON Instead. Also the helm package manager is written in Golang, I want to dive deeper into K8s.
This AI Agent should have been a SQL Query: This one was more like Apache Flink comparison and walkthrough, maybe as a example but it was good.

Watched

The State of Authentication
- This is so messed up. There are actually three parts in Authentication. I thought Authentication and Authorization, that’s it
- Authentication is basically “Am I who I say I am?”
- Authorisation is what I am allowed to do (if i am who I say I am)\
- Now the third part of Authentication
- Auth UI: Lo behold, UIs are not my thing, and yes Auth0 and some other probably some other services too.

Andrej Karapathy: Software is Changing
- We are in Software 3.0 Era
- Software 1.0 was code | Software 2.0 was Neural Networks
- Now we are in the LLM space, were we can send prompts to neural networks that can generate programs, that is wild idea
- We need to create systems around LLMs, like interface to interact LLMs, He puts it like we are in the 1960s era of Computing. Where the computers were not personal, they were mainframe, large machines that fit on factories.
- However the LLMs today are like those big gigantic computers that live in the cloud running in multiple clusters of GPUs, though we have local LLMs, the quality and accuracy of high parameter models is not near the local small sized models (they are improving). So we are reliant on Cloud inference like ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral, LLaMA, Gemini, etc.
- He relates the transition of LLMs with the augmentation to an autonomous agent. This is compared to Iron Man’s suite, which is a mixture of human control along with AI assistance. When he is outside the augmented mode, its his instinct that help him navigate, however, in the agent mode, the AI decides the track.
- Also the vibe coding term was emphasised which has a Wikipedia entry. Vibe coding is easy to do because we don’t care about the code, we care about the outcome, we can call it product driven prompting. And it makes sense when he said, we need to increase the Human-verification and AI-generation loop. It doesn’t mean, you’ll tell AI to one-shot the entire thing, instead go bit by bit, one thing and one action and feedback at a time.

99% of the AI Startups will be Dead by 2026
- Obivious, Startup is about survival and if all of them are wrappers around just a LLM they might die. But only if they are just that and nothing else. Turns out most startups might just be that.
- However, many unicorns and valuable startups are built due to trust and alignment of the problem solved by the product and faced by their users, so its about competition there.
- AI is here to stay and evolve, if the product keeps adapting, it will survive no matter what, the trend is, if people like it, people will pay to use it for comfort.

Why Internet went down for 2.5 hours on 12th-13th June 2025 (IST Timings)
- Half of the internet was down for almost 2.5 hours, due to Google Cloud outage.
- Cloudflare was down due to one service of theirs was reliant on Google Cloud, and that spiralled to all other services. Whoa! dependency hell is real.

Learnt

LLaMA actaully stands for Large Language Model Meta AI
A wired random prompt that surprisingly is not random: Tweet
- This is not 100% reproducible but quite the gist of it is similar
- Pick a number between 1 and 100
  - ChatGPT, LLaMA, Claude, Mistral gives 27
  - Grok AI gives 42
- Pick a random letter between a and z
  - ChatGPT, Mistral gives M or K
  - Grok AI, LLaMA gives K
- This is a wired behaviour from LLMs, and it also makes sense since it will try to mimic what it has seen most of the times in its training process.
Render is the new Heroku for free application deployment
- I used it to deploy my FastAPI backend for BYOK AI Chat App.
- Its similar to the old Heroku hobby tier plan, which was vindicated in 2022.
- I am not sure how reliable these Platform-As-A-Service are anymore after the Heroku sunset of hobby plan, but nonetheless its what we get from a free tier and its worth appreciating such companies are providing free tiers.
- I am wondering can Appwrite take over its spot, its more of a microservice oriented setup but still it has a lot of potential to compete in the space.
Copy and Paste Markdown in Google Docs
- This was a neat trick to learn, especially if you are writing for documentation and personal notes. Also handy if you want to quickly add something special without fluff in the doc. The keyboard centric approach helps in this markdown style.

Tech News

Duolingo launches Chess as a course
It wasn’t built by a huge team or chess experts. It started with a PM, a designer, and Cursor, an AI coding assistant. No engineers. No dev team.
Google Cloud Outage on 12-13th June 2025 for 2.5 hours
Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#751 edition) not arrived yet, and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Leave a comment

That’s it for this week. Hoped for a good week, got one, hoping for a better week.

Thanks for reading :)

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #46

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #46

Life takes turns pretty quickly. I was here last week, complaining about life and here I am today, feeling grateful for whatever happened to me.

I took decisions last week and by mid-week, I was seeing results, like actual results. And I was just thrilled to experience it, when you decide to change, the universe listens and blesses you with opportunities. I am grateful for the things blessed to me through the week. Even if I fail next week, I have a head start to keep going and break the shackles one day.

Throughout the week, I dabbled in LLMs. Learning about different providers and models.

I spent 20 minutes playing this game before writing this newsletter. I was reading the Hacker News newsletter, and I saw this link and wow, the game is so cool. A binary search to find a word. A wordle but not quite that.

Quote of the week

“Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice reduces the imperfection.”
— Toba Beta

I have been in the craft of programming for over 5 years, and now I know that it’s about figuring things out. I was naive and all over the place when I started, but slowly I learnt from mistakes and started to feel the patterns in solving problems. I am not perfect, never will be, but will have less muddier and novice like traits in me.

That’s what it means to live a developer’s life, really, adopting and adopting till your hunger and curiosity to know things is satisfied, it will be on you to keep it on till your last breathe.

Created

Bring your own keys (BYOK) AI Chat App
- Created entirely from Claude and Lovable AI
- Added Litellm for providers and model selection
- FastAPI for backend, Bun/React for Frontend
- Thinking of using a per-user database with Turso
LiteLLM listing providers and models
- This is a rough draft version of the post.
- I have worked together the way to list down the providers and models
- Looking at what else could be done and exploring different ways to query info about a specific model

Read

How I finally understood Docker and Kubernetes
- This was my pick of the week. I understood the reason why Kubernetes exists
- I knew the concept of Docker (it could be because I have used it extensively in the past to create projects as well in my internships to deploy APIs and apps)
- But the concept of Kubernetes is like a black-box. But the author’s explanation style and simple example made it clear.
- Kubernetes is like
  - Container Image > Deployment > Pod > Service
- Container Image is the actual image of your app that you want to run, maybe it has multiple of those.
- Deployment is like defining what and how many (other things too) to run.
- Pod is like the actual unit of containers; in itself, it has no control, it just runs whatever was given to it.
- Service is like the layer that exposes it to the world, maybe the network, the other containers, which are like a configurable exposure of the network.
I am disappointed in AI discourse
- Wow, at least someone feels like me. This was so relatable to read on a Sunday afternoon.
- This feels relatable to feel like how can people draw conclusions and biases when the technology is evolving everyday.
- People are either fully bullish on AI, i.e. by 2026, no developers needed, to some saying AI is still crap. Both of them don’t know what AI is capable yet. It is not that bad, compared to a year ago, it’s really good at generating almost accurate code, but not quite the touch that it can be untouched without a developer glancing and ficing it.
The Software Engineering Identity Crisis
- The quote that sums this well is this:
  Perhaps the most valuable skill in this new landscape isn’t prompt engineering or systems architecture, but adaptability - the willingness to evolve, to learn new skills, and to find your unique place in a rapidly changing field.
- Adoption is a skill that you can hone and be an engineer of the AI revolution
- The author thinks that there will be engineering in terms of managing and overlooking Agents or AI Systems. Also a good point mentioned is “The scope of engineering is not shrinking, it’s expanding”. I can see this point coming true in some sense as the level of understanding to drive these AI systems is better suitable to programmers and engineers. Since they already deal with the pain of solving problems. AI is no different.
- The first part that hits me the most is the loss of joy. I talked about it in the previous weeks. I don’t want to repeat that rambling, but yes, that somewhat feels a bit uncomfortable to digest.
- An excellent post in navigating this AI landscape while maintaining the core feelings of a developer and where it breaks.
Programming with Agents: Sketch.dev
- Great post on agents, good and expected take on agent definition
- David also narrates the need for agents and why they are suddenly in the hype. The function calling thing just blew the AI hype and at that time, the LLMs were not ready or trained for it. But in 2025, those LLMs are optimised for it, making it a great ecosystem to work towards.
- This actually raises questions: Do you really need the craft? The IDE? If the agent can do it for you at the speed of a prompt? Yes, LLMs are not gods, they need assistance, and when they go berserk, its on the developer to hone on his tools and hack it out of the mess.
The Gentle Singularity: Sam Altman’s Blog
- Sam thinks that GPTs are powerful than any human lived on earth, is that really accurate? Maybe, in terms of knowledge, but that’s not truly knowledge. It does have billions of weights that somewhat represent the knowledge, but can it make sense of it? No, not yet. With tools and reasoning, maybe, but not quite without proper instructions.
- The other stuff is just sci-fi future prediction. I don’t think that is true, but his vision is a bit daunting if that is slightly true.
- He also mentions how many watts are consumed per GPT call, which is hilariously alarming.
Anyone can cook: How 37 Signals hired a junior developer
- Intrinsic motivation is greater than an educational degree; this is true for any professional. Because the degree won’t sustain you longer, if there is a fire within, that will carry on.
AI IDEs Free Tier War
- Windsurf is surprisingly cheap, but they don’t have access to models like Claude 4 and others.
- GPT 4.1 is good and all, but that’s a little supbar with the standard of Claude
- I don’t know if that’s just me or I feel confident in copy-pasting a file from claude than from GPT

Watched

Janvi Kalra From Software Engineer to AI Engineer at OpenAI
The Pragmatic Engineer
- This was a really inspirational interview. Its giving me hope in continuing what I am doing currently; being excited and willing to develop stuff, doing the due-deligence to research and solve things.
- I think I now understand my flaw; I am not specific. I am all over the place.
- She was very specific in boiling down what she was interested in, listing down the 50+ companies in that space, and getting the interviews. It shows the care and love for the craft.
- I am not sure how to do that, really, because I think I would miss out on certain roles where I might feel excited. I am really a bad problem solver, I don’t know what I should focus on. I think I need to write more in order to nail it down in the coming weeks. Let’s do that and let’s see where it takes me.

My AI Skeptic Friends are Nuts: Review by Theo
- I read the article last week, and surely it was AI bullish, but the GraphQL, Web3 bubble value to hype ratio just made me relate to this AI hype.
- The hype is too high, but the value bar is high too; we need to get the value, which is a bit easier, but avoiding the hype and fluff is a bit tricky. I think by being hands-on you can separate the fluff from value.

Are we feeling it now? The AI Model Fatigue
- There are too many models to keep track of, I had raised this concern in the past two weeks, but no one listens. Here we are in an LLM model apocalypse.
- Maybe it’s a positive one, but we need to slow down a little.

Dopamine Driven Development
- Passing tests, GitHub action tick, first try especially, different error message all gives dopamine, and that is not a cheap dopamine, its a value to effort cost.

Learnt

Using LLMLite to list different models and providers
- We can use `models_by_provider`, which is a dictionary of provider keys and a list of strings representing model names provided by the provider
Over 3 years of only Python, I didn’t know ABC are abstract classes
- I am ashamed that ABC and abstract_method are a thing in Python
- Never really used them, never made sense, but yes, now it makes sense to use and see them

from abc import ABC, abstract_method

class Shape(ABC):
    @abstract_method
    def area():
        pass
   
    @abstract_method
    def perimeter():
        pass

Tech News

Mistral releases Magistral, a thinking/reasoning model
- It thinks like crazy, I saw from a clip.
Open AI releases o3-pro and drops the prices by 80%
- mini - standard - pro is the ecosystem Open AI has created for its thinking models
- o1 - o3 - o4
- By the time o3 standard or pro was released, o4-mini was already to the same level
Did Apple just give up on AI?
- AI and Apple can’t be on the same boat at least in 2025, it seems.
- Sad to see it, but they are truly behind in tech right now. Their hardware is good, but they have to grow significantly to stay even competitive.

Phew, what a week, nothing much in releases, but the cloudflare x google cloud outage just wrecked havoc in almost half IT companies. Many unicorns faced this downtime for a while. That’s a wild week till June 14th

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#750 edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Leave a comment

That’s it for this week. Hoped for a good week, got one, hoping for a better week.

Thanks for reading :)

Techstructive Weekly #45

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #45

This week was exciting at first, but slowly it went on the extreme bad spectrum for me, leaving a spot for taking a bold decision.

Almost on the verge of a burnout or a big decision. Its been 3 months now, the first sparkle was created and now I think its high time to take the big decision. It’s no longer rash, but it’s a long thought decision.

Anyways, I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s see in the next few weeks where the wind take me.

I explored the AI Agents by creating a local agent in Python from scratch with the Meta AI LLM. It was a fun one, list, read, and edit files tools provided, I also wanted to add shell command execution. Will be doing it next weekend. Also had explored the LLM-plugin for Meta AI LLM wrapper.

Quote of the week

"We were born in order to see and listen to the world. It’s a powerful notion, with the potential to subtly reshape our view of everything."
— Mentioned in Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa

See and Listen is a very deep thing to do, it just changes everything, it eases the soul, removes the burden and expectations from one’s shoulder. The quote/sentence is simple, yet it hits home for a person feeling lost in life.

Created

AI Coding Agent with tools from scratch in Python
- Meta AI API client
- Tools like read/list/edit files
- Used the blog from ampcode (Sourcegraph): How to build Agents
- Livestreamed it
Created LLM plugin for Meta AI API
- LLM is a cli created by Simon Wilson, its pretty easy to use and supports a whole bunch of models and features like tool calling and image parsing, etc.

Read

My AI Skeptic friends are all nuts
- This was a hot post on Hacker News for a week, rightly so, it is partial and follows an experienced developer talking about how LLMs are useful as a tool and not a job replacer.
- I love one point, which is this quote:
  Often, LLMs will drop you precisely at that golden moment where shit almost works, and development means tweaking code and immediately seeing things work better. That dopamine hit is why I code.
  I have talked about it previously, and it resonates with me too. I haven’t tried it to the extreme yet. But this is what it is supposed to be doing, if done and used correctly.
- Caring about the craft is what the author rightly meant to keep LLM out of the loop. He compares with the woodworking; if you treat woodworking as a hobby, then you should care about the tiny details and fine refinements. That is not something for LLM to take care.
- Junior level output of these LLM is a bit scary. It makes juniors a place of bother.
AI changes everything
- Everyone seems to be positive about AI, I am not against it, its good, but its moving too fast.
  I encourage you not meet that moment with cynicism or fear: meet it with curiosity, responsibility and the conviction that this future will be bright and worth embracing.

AI is rotting my brain
- “We couldn’t stop making art even if we tried,” that hit me, it makes me feel alive and have purpose in life again.
- Yes, learning about LLM and how it is working is super fun, its quite interesting and rewarding. Then that makes the point that LLMs are not bad, it’s the adoption by people that matters.

My Engineering Craft regressed
- This is literally me. I can completely get the words of the person. Its exciting to work on side projects and contribute to open source projects, but really no one cares, but I have done it so far for personal pleasure.
- If something makes me learn new things and go from knowing nothing to fixing a bug, the feeling of finally being able to go through that and see the green tick is so satisfying that the “who cares” question is just out of the equation. The feeling cannot be compared with anything.
- I also feel a bit sluggish when solving LeetCode, I hate it for some reason. I have barely done any problems on leetcode, let alone grind it for weeks and months. I don’t quite understand the purpose of it. Just to get the job? To improve problem-solving skills? Maybe, but that’s just not how my brain likes to solve problems; my brain works when it sees the problem.
First User Framework
- If there is no user, that is not a solution; it is a problem you are inventing yourself.
- If you are developing something for yourself, don’t do it right away. If you have the time and capacity to keep up with the learning and work-life balance, then do it without thinking. But if you are already burnt out, maybe just don’t, it might lead you nowhere.
- If you have one user, start building it. If you have at least a user, there is already a feedback loop developed once you build it. The instant feedback input and the validation part makes it addictive.

Styling the icons for HTML date and time types: Cassidy Williams Blog
- This was a specific tip, but goes on to make me understand the input types are so rich in HTML. We can do so many things. Some of them might be browser based, and might be specific to certain versions, but still being able to do with bare bones HTML is amazing.

Watched

AI is coming for your job:
- It’s far from that, as per Simon Wilson, the people with the domain expertise leveraging these tools and LLMs will be at the forefront and take the most advantage of the assistance.
- It has cut the development or creation speed to almost half or even lower. This takes off the tedious efforts or menial work and puts humans heading the creative space.

Theo Browne on Development and Career
- Be curious, be active
- Content is bullshit, don’t consume too much, be actively building and enthusiasitic about the craft

Learnt

People want LLMs everywhere, but the moment they add LLMs (or any shiny new thing), the cost of maintaining it creeps up, and in the end, we have to think everything back and put duct tape to limit their use of those.
- I am annoyed by that, it was never explained why there was a need to add LLM everywhere. If everyone is following the trend, then I understand the reasoning behind it, but if we didn’t consider the consequences, then it becomes a nightmare.
- Its like release > release > rollback > rollback
- What was the use of that? wasted time, energy, money, and most importantly, trust.

Managing API is critical, a couple of changes and boom, the backward compatibility strikes in front
- Versioning is good, but it shows the level of lack of commitment of the company or developer to support or make breaking changes
- I had worked with an API, one that I was really new to the system so it was broken and not well thought out, but later now it was revamped for another use case.
- Somehow, the older API was used again, and by the time the new API was being used, the older API almost completely broke off.
- I learnt that making changes in this type of environment is critical and needs testing and versioning in the worst case.

Tech News

Anthropic releases Claude Explains: An AI-generated blog about its user interaction and usage.
- The site seems to be taken down by Anthropic, maybe it created a backlash.
Cursor launches 1.0: This makes Cursor a big product.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#749 edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it for this week. A bit of harsh week (Friday deploys ruined everything).

let’s hope for better for the next week.

Thanks for reading :)

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public, so feel free to share it.

Leave a comment

Techstructive Weekly #44

Sat, 31 May 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #44

It was week of comeback. 1 videos and 2 live streams, back on track. Though lost the steam in the middle of the week. Still fresh and excited to get hands on projects this weekend.

Appwrite Sites? Android Apps for LLMs? AI Agents with some specific goals?

We’ll roll the die and let’s nature take where it wants to. We’ll start though, I realized it at the end of last week. No brainer right, once I start something, it quickly makes me addicted to completing it and the thing in between is curiosity and consistency. Not hamering buzzwords, but truly, I just started to record the video for pydantic AI and I created a few examples, within an hour I had 7 examples created. Some of which I had to discard, but nonetheless, enough material for a video to record.

Hit the record button and started speaking, some 1-2 hours later, was completed with 1 and 20 minutes of raw footage, next day edited it and published. I t turned out to be a 45 minute video, not bad, it only has got around 30 views in 4 days, but nevermind that. I learned a lot and got a good understanding of AI Agents with Pydantic AI.

A good week, looking to the next week for more projects created and feeling more satisfied with my efforts. Because that is what we can do, focus on the efforts, forget about the results.

Quote of the week

"You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward."

I created the examples and then recorded the video (i.e. the thing I wanted to show). I knew what I wanted to explain in that video, a general direction, but after creating the examples, I really got the understanding of what I actually meant and what I am creating, that was working backwards and figuring it out on the go.

Simialrly in life, we don’t know the future, we can’t. We know the direction, but not the actual destination. We know what we have done, and by doing what you feel right right now is the way to move ahead, overthinking, perfectioning the thing, will just delay it. Just do it, follow the intuition.

Created

Creating AI Agents with Pydantic AI
- Understanding the basics of Pydantic AI
- Using the output type to get the structured response back from LLMs and AI Agents
- Using tools with LLMs called Agents with Pydantic AI
- Using local as well as cloud provider models in Pydantic AI

Live Streamed

Completing the database sync and admin routes for CMS in the Static Site Generator in Golang

On Saturday, I was expecting to create Appwrite sites, but was surprised to find it in a waitlist, so decided to move on and complete the CMS for my SSG

I created the script to sync the database and posts on the github repo, it had a issue with the SQL query and I fixed it later after the stream.

On Sunday, I continued with the CMS part, and added the workflow with the sync script to write the contents to the GitHub repo.

Also added authentication to the Sync DB and Trigger build GitHub actions to only the authors in the site with Netlify Cloud functions.

Finally completing the SSG + CMS in Golang called Burrow.

Read

The Copilot Dillusion:
- This was like a word of caution of getting too much reliant on AI for coding
- Coding with AI is all well and good, but the thinking part still is in the heads of the developer. It can’t think beyond a certain capability.
- Till now, its fair to say from this post that, AI is most safer in the hands of developers than laymen for coding. It’s not gone that far that managers can vibe code and ship everyday.
- Maybe someday it will, but there will be the need of developers in pushing it and nudging it to get the most of it.
Am I online? A useful way to identify your servers are connected to the internet.
Read out the thing you have written:
- This is like a thought or tip from Martin Fowler
- He suggests to read out (at least lip movement) the thing we have written. I really like it and have not noticed it yet, but yes that is true.
- We get a different perspective and feel for the draft that we have written. Its almost like reviewing your code locally vs on GitHub. You get something while reading out that you don’t just reading in mind.
Explaing Transformers in simple words:
- This was a simple yet effective explanation of the transformer model architecture
- It skipped the middle part, it explained the input and output part well though, enough for someone to get curious and fall in the rabbit hole of exploration.

janvi kalra

Explaining GPT-4’s Secret Sauce: Transformers

Transformers are the secret sauce that makes Chat-GPT, DALL-E, and other GPT-based systems so powerful. No, I'm not talking about Optimus Prime and his Autobot pals 🚗🤖 - I'm talking about the neural network architecture. Transformers are the "T" in GPT-4 (Generative Pretrained Transformers v4), and their development has enabled machines to understand …

3 years ago · 13 likes · 1 comment · Janvi Kalra

Let’s Fing Go:
- This was a reflection and a way for switching and learning Go from Javascript. It is evident that Golang is the almost the perfect tool for backend servers and quick simple applications. Not saying its bad for complex applications, but one must be equipped with the right set of tooling and mindset to head into a large scale application, rather than complain about writing bunch of err != nil, skill issues.

Interesting Things

Radicle: The GitHub alternative
- This week we had a GitHub outage, and on twitter I read about someone complaining, how has someone not figured out a GitHub alternative.
- The tweeter mentioned that it was just a

Watched

Inside an LLM
- This 3 videos in the series were so much valuable. It helped me understand the mathematics and the architecture behind LLMs. Its quite fascinating
- I am now thinking about explaining these concepts to laymen because I want them to understand what they are actually interfacing with are just mathematical numbers and nothing human like robots.

MIT Lecture: LLMs introduction
- It had me till the part “LLMs can do math”, no please no.
- All the parts of the videos were great, it touched upon almost everything about LLM and the capabilities it has, helped understand the difference of the actual model and the interface we are interacting with.

API Gateways
- This was a concise explanation of API Gateways
- API Gateways are simply a way to route your app to the microservices you have, and also some gluecode like middleware and rate limiting which might be repeated across most of the microservices.

Primeagent tried AI Video Services
- Just for entertainment, this was funny though (some jokes went over my head though)
- Veo 3 and Luma something was great at almost realistic and relatable videos
- There were services that were clearly there and others were pieces of shit.
- Nothing in between because average sucks.

Learnt

Comparing values in Python. We can also compare any type with the equality operator.
- I thought I might get an error if the value is None and I am comparing the value with a string, but I was wrong
- In Python, the equality operator can allow any type of expression to be compared with any value.

Tech News

Anthropic finally launches the voice mode in its model
- Finally anthropic is adding voice mode. I love the way that anthropic comes at everything from behind and takes everything at it head, hopefully here will be the same.
- The code part, the thinking part, the editing part of code is so reliable in Claude, however the search part I am not sure of.
Mistral launches AI Agents API
- Every company is launching remote agents
- Jules from Google, Codex from OpenAI
- Now mistral, they have similar things
  - Python code environment
  - GitHub integration
Deepseek R1 with the new update to its model
- This seems to be inching slightly up and a less heavier model than devstral or other models runnable in a single GPU or limited RAM
- Let’s see how community tests and where it ranks over the week

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#748 edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

So that’s a wrap from the #44 edition of the newsletter, which has turning out to be my reflection of the week, which it is. Some questions that we can discuss about

Agents are great, still people hate when it is mentioned, what do you think? I meant the tools and LLMs in the loop
Are you using Remote agents while coding? some quick tasks or prototypes?
Are you using local agents like claude code, amp, wrap? how do you handle costs?
What are your thoughts on AI Video generation? do you feel scared about it

Let’s try to wrap our heads around these questions, since we need sometime and mental space to explore the huge impact AI is having on us. TIll then, keep coding.

That’s it from this 44th edition of my weekly learning. I hope you enjoyed it, and leave comments on what you think about some of my takes or any feedback.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #43

Sat, 24 May 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #43

What a whirlwind of a week. This was expected, nothing new. New week, new models, every day feels closer to losing the developer job. But everytime, AI sucks and human grug brain works.

This week, I took a step back and tried to ease myself out from this AI slop. Want to really plan the things out and start the grind again. Need to re-align my core values and get back to the consistent and curious flaming torch in guiding myself in the AI abyss.

LLMs and AI Labs are out of control, they are releasing new models left and right.

Number of LLM models released this week: 5

Gemini 2.5 Flash Pro (improved)
Gemma 3n
Devstral
Vercel’s v0-1.0-md model
Claude 4 family (Sonnet and Opus)

This is a new section. At this rate, I am overwhelmed trying to keep track of which model is released at what time, since new models keep popping up constantly.

I spent a lot of time reading and understanding about Agents, and will be creating some form of content around it. For my understanding, as well as creating a resource for this AI hype, to get my hands dirty.

Some personal news, I migrated my blog from markata to my own SSG from scratch, named Burrow. Bold move! I don’t care, no one’s reading my post, so it doesn’t matter, I kept the links intact. A win for me.

Burrow
- Built from bare-bones golang
- Only 3rd party library (goldmark) used for markdown parsing (thought of wiring own markdown parser some day to remove this :)
- Github SDK for some automation and LibSQL driver for database syncing
Markata by Waylon Walker
- Nothing wrong with this SSG, it was fantastic to write our own plugins, and most of the plugins were built-in. But I wanted to explore more about Golang. And this was the move I took.
- The current burrow-ssg in golang is inspired by markata

Quote of the week

"Stay hungry, stay foolish."
— Steve Jobs

I listened to the speech of Steve Jobs, and there were three lessons that he tried to convey:

Follow your heart, let the dot connects
Keep looking, don’t settle
Do it as if you are living the last day of your life

This just are valuable life lessons that he might have spend 50 years on. These are given by wisdom and not knowledge.

Stay hungry, bring the curiosity, and keep fighting and keep throwing your hands and legs at it, you will be at the top one day.

Wrote

Thoughts
- Appwrite is now Fullstack-as-a-Service
- I kind of hate Agentic IDEs for the sake of productivity

Nothing significant, because I have been in the cave, cooking stuff. This weekend it will be something. Pushing hard, coding, not vibe, just bug smashing.

Read

No docs, no bugs
- This is silly; the more detail you put, the more detailed your tests have to be
- The more tests there are, the probability of all of them passing would start decreasing, and hence, it could cause subtle bugs
- So I think it is a matter of convincing yourself to write more tests and documentation
Nothing makes me want to hire someone less than them showing an open-to-work badge
- This is a good take, if someone has put an open-to-work badge, it might mean that the person is giving indication to his/her openness to work.
- We can’t judge by that, and should not, as the person might be in a weird situation and can’t openly express their situation so the badge gives them a slight help in communicating without actually speaking about it.
Revenge of the junior developer
- Ok, I spent half an hour reading this article and felt a mix of opinions
- On one side, I am happy that I am a junior, I am dabbling with AI agents and tab tab things, but it’s kind of weird to use them.
- I don’t like the review part, it feels like a daunting task
I really don’t like ChatGPT’s new memory feature change
- I haven’t used this, but I can understand the feeling of this
- This looks like a feature without a button, a default feature. Really, are these big companies talking about AGI and care about the values, and slopping users with a bare minimum experience?
Build systems
- In short, you should not use AI slop, pretty obvious
  Behind the Screen
  Build Systems
  Everyone around us, even people far from the world of tech and startups, are talking about AI. From social media to mainstream news, WhatsApp groups to coffee chats, there is always some mention of AI…
  Read more
  8 months ago · 2 likes · Yogini Bende
Glauber Costa on Technical Blogging
- These are golden points here
  - Just write it down
  - Showcasing benchmarks is a bit hard
  - If you are not sure about it, reluctant about publishing it, just do it, as you don’t know what will work and what won’t until you haven’t done it.
    Write that blog!
    Glauber Costa on Technical Blogging
    Welcome to our latest attempt to (not-so) gently nudge you to write more! Following up on writethat.blog and Writing for Developers: Blogs That Get Read, we’re sharing the perspectives of expert tech bloggers: why they write, how they tackle writing challenges, and their lessons learned. This time, let’s hear from Glauber Costa…
    Read more
    8 months ago · 2 likes

Watched

Visual Studio Code + Copilot is not open source
- VS Code is trying to save tools like cline and augment code
- Basically, making developers stick to the VS Code ecosystem as closely as possible
- This will make that happen, with Copilot abilities (not the server), access to make the abilities run within VS Code, so people don’t have to fork it.

Google keeps winning
- Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash are killing it with the new improvements
- Gemini is getting integrated into almost everything at Google
Appwrite Sites
- This is cool, I talked about it in my thoughts as Appwrite is kind of entering the full-stack as a service ecosystem with this launch
- They came #1 on Product Hunt this week
Datbricks bought Neon
- This is a interesting buy
- Data analysis with the powerhouse database ready for AI
- Making a viable integration with the Neon database.
- Great move by Databricks
- Neon doesn’t have enterprise customers, they are low on funds. But they have a wide adoption and great AI integrations
- Databricks has enterprise customers, but not much to offer on the AI side
- Combine the,m and suddenly they both become a deadly combo

Learnt

Using Jules to get things done on GitHub
- Write the thing you want to do
- It will create a branch > you only have to create and merge the PR
Use Open Router to use Anthropic models since it’s not quite reliable with their own API

Tech News

Do we have a website to track which thing, product, model, or tool was released when? If not, I am going to create one specifically for LLM and AI stuff, because this thing is getting out of hand. We are seeing models drop almost every 2 days. This is crazy stuff. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, xAI, Alibaba, Cohere, in loops over months and weeks with new models. The never-ending cycle. Let’s see if we can predict what model will be next.

Ok, this week we say 5 LLM models are getting released, and those are not any normal models, those are quite a significant push in the state of the art for what LLMs can do.

Anthropic with Claude 4 family (Sonnet and Opus)
- Quite solid in coding task, I just tried giving it a golang file and it corrected all the errors and weird quirks it had.
Mistral with Devstral
- This is a 14 GB, 23 Billion Parameter model for coding task
- Not sure about performance but it requires 32 GB Ram to run, so I am out of uck on that.
- Waiting for a slight lightweight model. Qwen is a great model in that sense.
Google with the improved Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro
- This was short lived as Claude 4 dropped with all guns blazing
- But Gemini is now getting into everything at Google
- This is leaning on the magnetic route in every product
Vercel with V0-1.0-md model
- This is a bold move from Vercel, could be used by UI developers extensively

Tools

Google with Jules and Stitch
Google’s Flow with Veo 3

Ok, too much Google

Here are the 100 things that Google released at the IO 2025

Phew! That is a lot of news in a week. Google and Anthropic have nailed it. Google is going all over the place with a commanding position, Anthropic taking the focus to the developer ecosystem by making the model better and better at tool calling and coding tasks.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (it’s a Boeing 747 edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Which model do you think is the ground-breaking model?
What agentic tools/IDE do you find more useful and help in improving productivity?

That’s it from this 43rd edition of my weekly learning. I hope you enjoyed it, and leave comments on what you think about some of my takes or any feedback.

Techstructive Weekly #42

Sat, 17 May 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #42

It has been a nasty week, both physically and emotionally. I am sick right now, still somehow finding the right amount of energy to pump this edition out. I have a sore throat and fever. Twitchy eyes in the cold make things worse.

But emotionally, I have been on the battlefield, it seems. The battle has started between my heart and mind. The one that cares about the craft, my soul, and the other about the ego, duties and responsibilities, fame, the thing that I am right now. It’s intense, I am barely able to breathe and think. It’s making me doubt myself, my decisions, my efforts, and my existence.

The war is not about winning, it is about fighting; even if I were to lose, I would be happy I fought. I didn't give up, but the opponent was a bit more powerful. There will be a revenge if I loose of course, but that is the worst case scenario.

Back to tech, I have been working on VLLMs, i.e., using Visual inputs to LLMs to get things out from it. Usually for extraction, summarizing, etc. And it was not that exciting, because I feel awkward working with LLMs these days. Especially to write code, not the process of integrating, I love that, but I am kind of forced to use LLMs in doing anything at work. Kind of feels like lavish luxury to some people, but for me, it’s a curse, a way to dig your own grave. People don't realize that LLMs are making humans dumb; they are making you think less, and do tab-tab auto-complete. Not saying it’s bad, but using it all the time makes me feel empty inside.

Ah! What a time to be a junior developer. What a worse way to start your career. A bump straight away. No time to think, no time to reflect.

I think this can't be a worse time to be a software developer, at least for the one who care about the art and craft of building software. They can still find joy, but can't hold the responsibilities.

Quote of the week

“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”
— Carl Jung

Yes, this is tough. I might speak a bit repetitively about these things, but this is important to get it out. AI is no longer a small hype like the Web-3 boom of 2022, the COVID pandemic lasting 2 years, it is more than that now. Chat GPT was launched in December of 2022, almost 2 years after its arrival, it has taken humans by storm.

Being able to replace your craft and art that your soul craves and loves with a machine is jarring and draining. As if there is no purpose left for humans. Yes, the quote is rightly placed for this time, at least for me. I don’t know how a developer cannot even feel a little scared after all of this. Hopefully, we will have some positive directions soon.

Read

The hidden cost of AI coding
- With AI and Agentic AI, we as developers are going to get very few flow state sessions. Since we will not be writing any code, we will be just guiding like a pilot, and the actual craft is up to LLM to do, which is scary and takes the fun out of the art.
- I am really upset and feeling empty after realising this. Also, there have been discussions around me where the takeover of AI by developers was around the corner. Not even that, I am not scared of that, but the part right now, where companies and top-level managers, or whatever they are called, are forcing developers to use LLMs. They say, Why use horse carts when we have flying jets. As if decades old tradition of writing software was wiped out in months.
- Really, it feels sad to be living in this revolution. It’s exciting at some point, agreed. But the more I use it, the more I fear.
- I really don’t feel that there will be such periods created for developers by most companies, since they only see money as output.
I just want to code
- I honestly feel this way, the war between your heart and mind.
- What a coincidence, I am on a war, turns out, everyone is too. Everyone is fighting the control of the mind over the heart, the ego over the soul.
- The author of this post has really put it well, just read that post, instead of this rambling.
What will coding look like in 2027
- This looks like an AI-slop at first, but then it kind of makes sense
- We are now abstracting away the core thing to AI (its pissing me off)
A critical look at MCP
- This is a great post, detailing out the actual protocol to see why it is there in place, which is a great question to have and get an answer to.
MCP: A protocol to watch
- I also get what MCP is for, I actually created the tool-calling extension for Meta AI’s API, which was a chat interface only. I saw the pain points and really found the need to standardizing the way we create, pass, and retrieve functions to LLMs.
- MCP is the protocol to do that, not just function/tool calling, it is also important for tool-specific context passing.
- But yes, the concrete ways to use this haven’t clicked with me yet. I have a few ideas, but not finding the motivation enough to build it end-to-end.

Watched

What is an embedding and a vector in a vector database
- This video made the concept crystal clear.
- The example there made perfect sense and actually helped in understanding the operation that might be involved in vectors.

MCP vs API
- The MCP explanation part was clear and great

Is AI going to steal your programming job?
- This is a bit scary, really, I am scared of anything because of LLMs and Agentic IDEs

Learnt

Passing images to LLMs for getting data out
System design and overall architecture knowledge are far more important than details in today's AI-focused world
- In today’s AI-driven world, system design and architectural thinking are becoming more valuable than deep knowledge of any single language or framework.
- Companies increasingly care about how well you can orchestrate large models and systems, not just how well you can code. We live in strange times.
- The traditional craft of programming is evolving, sometimes at the cost of depth and intentionality. AI was meant to help us with chores and the mundane, but we’ve turned it into something else entirely.
- Maybe this is a turning point. If we don’t reflect now, the direction we take might be hard to reverse later.

Tech News

Windsurf launches its SWE models
- Looks a bit scary, but like every model we have seen, it might not be that great. But if that is, developers are on the verge of replacement at least in some percentage. But the start of AI era is here. I don’t like where this is going.
ChatGPT now has an agentic code assistant in it
- This was just a live stream as I am writing this post.

We surely will have a new Anthropic model drop next week, that's what the rumors says.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter, and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from this 42nd edition of my weekly learning. I hope you enjoyed it, and leave comments on what you think about some of my takes or any feedback.

Techstructive Weekly #41

Sat, 10 May 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #41

A slow-moving week overall. I had some spiritual realizations, not major, but enough to clear mental clutter and ease the overthinking through action, without worrying about results

The past weekend was too boring; I was not able to do anything fancy. Didn’t live stream, nor create a video. I think videos are not my thing for the moment, It takes too much energy to edit and polish my voice, and I don’t see enough return on that investment right now.

That gives me some time to crunch some articles and blog posts. Will be focusing on that and see if I can get more value than videos, that’s my theory for my skills, but I need to experiment.

AI Slop

Ok, we cannot spend any week without rambling about AI and LLMs, can we? This week, I read a few articles about vibe coding and the jazz people have created that it is going to replace developers. To that, I say: hell no. Yes, it can write code, well-documented even, but can it solve the whole problem? Nope. Not yet! It’s way far from that, however, if you give it all the pieces, and you think the solution and give it nudges in certain directions, then? Yes, to some extent.

We are on a cliff right now, we as developers need to learn to use LLMs to our advantage, but on the other side of the cliff is the part which is almost LLM writing the code, which looking at the speed of accuracy of code being written by different models, its not far but not quite there yet. It is at the stage where only a developer can steer the wheel; once a layman can steer the wheel, developers are doomed, but till then, till the laymen realize that developers are doomed, we are going to rule, take out their money for sure.

Quote of the week

“It is never the tool that decides. It's the hands-and the heart-of the one who wields it.”
― Kevin Sands

AI right now feels like that tool, if you give it to a layman, normal person, they will call it shit for coding, but if you give it to a good developer, he/she will say that I want that in my tool belt always. Creating software is a craft, an art, and it is suited for those learning and caring about the craft and tools, not those looking for expensive or shiny tools. Try, fail, learn, improve, that is LLM at the moment for coding:

Don’t blindly accept suggestions, take time to reflect, it has already saved you a bunch of minutes by writing, may as well read it and understand and think
If you don’t know a thing that it added, search and start a chat with LLM with search documentation tool
If it fails, retry, but think why is it failing, read the error message, if you are experienced, you can fix it quickly than an LLM, don’t waste time and tokens, do it yourself.

In essence, having a general common sense of using LLM tools is vital in today’s software development ecosystem. Might not be relevant to software, but I am not sure.

Read

What even is Vibe coding
- I completely agree with the entire post, this is the best take on vibe coding. I have experienced this and also mentioned it in my post. AI can handle the boring part, so that the developer can focus on the important, the heart of the craft. Whatever AI creates before this needs to be seen with a grain of salt, i.e., needs testing and review, it’s not a real person writing code after all.
- It’s more of a tool than a replacement. LLMs are not there yet, it’s far from reality and close to boilerplate or already solved problems, not innovation.
- If AI is giving you the entire code, then it is likely that the idea that you have for the software is already kind of there, not entirely, but vaguely there. For real innovations in the software, you still would need a developer.
I read the book The War of Art, Why?
- I asked Chat GPT, based on my conversation and everything you know about me, to give me a book recommendation. And it gave the war of art
- And Oh my god! I loved the book, it was a quick one. I don’t usually read non-fiction, self-help books because I already have too many technical things in my work and side projects that I can’t bear reading those in my spare time.
- But that book was a huge shift in mindset. We are all battling resistance. The bigger the resistance, the bigger the calling (the good task or intuition). We have to defeat that enemy, and it’s not easy, but with a war, it can be defeated. And it’s not an enemy once you defeat it, it’s done; rather, it’s a daily war, it will come in the places you are comfortable.
- This prompt was a pretty good use of LLMs, to be honest. If you can tune it to your needs, LLMs are a blessing; if you try using it for your replacement, you are destined to suffer.

Watched

A case against SQL
- I agree to the points that SQL is a bad abstraction of programs, we can use strings to query the database
- We should use the actual interface to access the database to query or mutate.
- But on the scale of complexity and ease of use, SQL outweighs the former
- We can think of SQL as Python and the native way as C; both are viable, but one is easier to write, and the latter is like shooting in the foot.

Learnt

Removing duplicates from a list of dictionaries

def remove_duplicate_dicts(dict_list):
    seen = set()
    unique_dicts = []
    for d in dict_list:
        dict_tuple = tuple(sorted(d.items()))
        if dict_tuple not in seen:
            seen.add(dict_tuple)
            unique_dicts.append(d)
    return unique_dicts

I didn’t code much this week. A bit of slow week, I don’t quite like this type of weeks, but have to go through them. However, I played with Lovable and Bolt for my website overhaul, and Lovable seems to be great, but very limited credits. Bolt is quite clunky and gets interrupted in the middle. very bad experience with Bolt.

Tech News

Gemini 2.5 better model for coding tasks: Gemini is really taking the lead here. Anthropic might lose the bet on the code quality vs cost race here if they don’t launch a great model in a couple of months (We all know they will)

OpenAI’s Sora becomes available for free users for image generation: I heard this yesterday, and I thought it was not there already seems it was there since 1st April. Not sure.
Open AI buys Windsurf for $3 billion: I watched an video of Thoe comparing the usage of these AI IDEs/editors, and Windsurf seems to be low at 4% adoption compared to almost 40% of VS Code and 30% of Other IDEs, and around 20-30% of Cursor usage. Which makes people think, why windsurf? Maybe that is a production-ready enterprise-grade IDE? I have used it and had no problems using it, but Cursor is good too.

Techstructive Weekly #40

Sat, 03 May 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #40

What a week, I knew the silence was just temporary, it would come at once, thankfully it was not too much releases to keep track of. There was however one release of a model (or a family of models) from Alibaba Cloud with the Qwen suite of models, that overthrew the Meta AI LLama Models from the SOTA standard for open source models.

This week, I explored a bit about LLMs and how to operate with them effectively, thanks to the prompt engineering masterclass from Anthropic. I created a bunch of things, leaving aside my fear and procrastination. This week, I was a bit specitical on myself but was able to break through the chains and took some hard decisions and executed, the results? Not sure, maybe good, might not work. But that is not in my hands, whatever was, is done. Time to move ahead and explore this AI revolution first hand.

Quote of the week

"Instead of a celebration of everything you know, an anti-library is an ode to everything you want to explore."
— Anne-Laure Le Cunff

I want to do this and this, nope, that might be output oriented

Let’s try to explore this and this, what might we need to do, what we need to go through to feel this?
That is the question that is answered in a process-oriented way.

I want to change this, and I have been reading the book, Tiny Experiments, so far it has changed quite a few things about my procrastination behaviour and helped me take actions over being scared or fretting over the perfectionism bug.

Created

This week, I started a different approach in creating, just publishing at the end of the day.

Built

Published the meta-ai-api tool-call python package
Agentic Calculator: LLM with math tools using Pydnatic AI and Vercel
- LLM: Meta AI Llama 4 (on API Wrapper with tool calls)
- Agent Framework: Pydantic AI
- Deployment: Vercel Lambda Functions

Wrote

Outlined a couple of articles (will publish and reveal soon)
Thought: ChatGPT on WhatsApp → might redirect in some time to → meetgor.com

Recorded

2 YouTube Shorts on ChatGPT and Perplexity released as WhatsApp Chatbots
Livestreamed
- Creating the Meta AI API wrapper with a tool call and a Pydantic AI model wrapper for the Meta AI API
- Building an Agentic Calculator with Pydantic, Appwrite (failed, then moved to Vercel), Meta AI API wrapper with tool calls

Read

Horseless Carriages :
- This was a great read. People making AI-based applications are too naive to understand the actual technology behind LLM and how the approach needs to be changed.
- Right now, it is the assumption that the developer is attached to the system prompt; however, LLMs at this stage need customisation from the user perspective and ndo ot have the dependency on the developer.
- The shift in developer-user responsibility is quite unnoticed, and this article highlights that effectively.
Be Kind :
- As a developer, we need to be kind, not just yes, thank you but really understand the person from other end and be humble about his/her situation and feelings.
- That might be too realistic for a developer to do (right? We are nerds, I think), but having that kindness and insight about the person we are interacting with sets us apart as an effective engineer.
Habits I recommend to a software developer
- Reading a book
- Build projects (keep building)
- Write to reflect the learnings
- Learn and build in public
Getting started with Pulumi
- I always wanted to understand Infrastructue and code, but no article helps me understand what it actually is solving, no one has yet shown the problem before the solution. I might find and write it myself one day (day one?).
Why can’t I be technical
- I didn’t completely read this, but this makes an interesting point, that we need to understand the opposite end of the thinking on the thing we are working on, kind of wired but that makes sense now.

Watched

Lessons on AI Agents from Claude plays Pokemon
- Wow, agents are already playing games, not exactly but quite fair I would say. Anthropic is really a lab, like they are researching LLM behaviors through and through; they are technical scientists.
- Claude plays Pokemon Red:
  - Send screenshot of the current state
  - Describe the game mechanics
  - Ask for the action
  - Iterate
- It’s quite a fascinating experiment. Maybe we can try with different types of games with LLMs. They tried a Pokémon-like game, because that isa very user-paced game, not a very rapid pace, or live-like games. Very smooth transitions and turn based game.

AI Prompt Engineering: Deep dive
- This is a masterclass in prompt engineering. Must watch
- Anthropic really cares about the craft and art of LLMs, they really understand what to think when interfacing to am LLM.
- First principle thinking

Advice for juniors on manager-engineer relation and Theo’s experience (must watch)
- TLDR: Don’t try to do the job that you are not asked, if the environment is pulling each other down.
- It’s doesn’t mean you not following your curiosity or doing the things you are excited to do, rather than knowing when to and when not to.

AI Coding is not enough we need Agnetic Coding:
- This is wild. I have been sleeping on Claude Code and Warp
- Those are the ones that are truly agentic editors.
- AI Coding (which people are pissed at) versus, Agentic Coding, that is really the difference. Agentic coding opens a wild number of possibilities. This is the second time, I am overwhelmed in life in programming. One was with Vim and Linux, there was so many things to learn and experiment with. And this time, its LLMs, models, tools, and so many details to learn, so many behaviours to understand. This is fascinating. Just watch this vide, I can’t be thankful to this person enough.

Learnt

GGUF, the file format for storing LLM model weights
- I wanted to evaluate a idea for a project. Running models from a file, and this file format is what I needed. Using this format and a binding with llama.cpp and other libraries, this can be used for inferencing later to actually run the model
Using llama.cpp python bindings to run a model with a gguf file
- We can use the llama.cpp or other library binding, to load the file in memory and the binding library will be using the inference to get the tokens out from the given prompt

Creating Python Lambda functions in Vercel

The snippet is what you need to get up and running with python serverless functions in Vercel

import json
from http.server import BaseHTTPRequestHandler
from urllib.parse import parse_qs, urlparse


class handler(BaseHTTPRequestHandler):
    
    def do_GET(self):
        parsed_path = urlparse(self.path)
        query_params = parse_qs(parsed_path.query)
        
        query = query_params.get('q', [''])[0]
        result = {"message": "hello, world!"}
        response_data = {"result": result}

        self.send_response(200)
        self.send_header('Content-type', 'application/json')
        self.end_headers()
        self.wfile.write(json.dumps(response_data).encode('utf-8'))
        print(response_data)
        return


    def do_POST(self):
        try:
            content_length = int(self.headers.get('Content-Length', 0))

            post_data_bytes = self.rfile.read(content_length)

            try:
                request_body = json.loads(post_data_bytes.decode('utf-8')
            except json.JSONDecodeError:
                self.send_response(400) # Bad Request
                self.send_header('Content-type', 'application/json')
                self.end_headers()
                self.wfile.write(json.dumps({"error": "Invalid JSON"}).encode('utf-8'))
                return

           
            response_message = {"status": "success", "received": request_body}

            self.send_response(200)
            self.send_header('Content-type', 'application/json')
            self.end_headers()
            self.wfile.write(json.dumps(response_message).encode('utf-8'))

        except Exception as e:
            print(f"Error handling POST request: {e}")
          
            if not self.headers_sent:
                 try:
                     self.send_error(500, f"Server error during POST: {e}")
                 except Exception as send_err:
                     print(send_err)
        return

Using the Warp terminal
- Warp is a terminal and it also has agentic flow, as well nice auto-completion, really awesome.

Tech News

Qwen 3 punches Meta on the face, becomes the sota model in open source models
- Alibaba released the Qwen 3 family of models with almost Gemini 2.5-like results on an open weight model
- The release was almost perfect, the integration so nice, the’ve put effort in making sure the model is available to all vendors on day 1, a state-of-the-art model release, set a standard for release as observed by Simon Wilson and a few others.
ChatGPT and Perplexity make the chatbot available to chat on WhatsApp
- This is a bit of a hot take, it can be revolutionary, it is exposing the LLMs to a wider audience, adoption rate might go high. I am not negative or positive at the moment, but it’s kind of revolutionary to see this things. Open AI again leading this revolution.
Redis becomes open source again
- Wow! A comeback from the tiny database that holds the internet.
- More than that, the v8 release sounds amazing! deep dive next week
Cloudflare launches a Python runtime for serverless functions
- This is interesting, Cloudflare has Python runtime for serverless functions for quite some time now. I found that a few months back. It’s kind of there, and not. As it’s a Pyodide runtime and not a native Python runtime, so there are limitations there. Only a few selected packages are compatible or made available to the pydodide runtime.
- Kind of limiting, since other providers like Appwrite, Vercel, support full-fledged support for Python

Phew — that was a long, wild week. Feels like the whole ecosystem is shifting under our feet. Everything’s speeding up. If I had to bet, next week’s bombshell will come from Google or Anthropic — probably on May the 4th. Just a feeling.

That’s it from this week, will see you in the next one!

Thanks for reading

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #39

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #39

A pretty active week, learning more about LLMs without getting distracted by a new model release (somehow this week there were no major releases by any provider, we can breathe).

This week, I truly explored the capabilities of LLMs, and to be honest, I was shocked. Moments before we thinking of a solution and pasted the problem in the LLM chat, with thinking and it was able to point out the exact solution. It was a subtle thing, but it makes humans wonder what their purpose is in life. I am kidding, of course, there are lot of things to improve upon as a human and a developer.

LLMs are not perfect and not reliable at the moment, that is the advantage humans have, not sure till when it can hold true. But we can keep exploring the problems LLMs have and keep upgrading our reflexes and intuitions.

I have started a writing journey on meetgor.bearblog.dev, Right now the theme seems to be LLM, but I will move with the flow.

Quote of the week

“The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.”
— B.F. Skinner

At this point, LLMs can think, of course, but is that real thinking or artificial thinking? Its artificial, since that is again trained on humans’ thinking put into words. AI can’t think on its own. It’s just trying to mimic humans in the hardest way possible. I mean it tries really hard. But what will be the dividing factor between humans and LLMs will be humans putting the first thought and the last thought.

Wrote

Can developers prevent the side project graveyard with LLMs?
- A personal opinion and view of how things are changing with the toolset of LLMs. Having LLMs and tool calling with some thinking can help a developer jump-start a project.
- I am not talking about vibe coding, just pair programming and AI-assisted programming. People have left no boundaries in those two concepts.
- LLMs are at a decent state and can perform more than boilerplate code tailored to the specific project, and handle CRUD and Authentication parts easily.
Complaining about the quality of LLMs? You might have skill issues
- If you think LLMs are too dumb and idiotic, think a bit more. Just like LLM does, it does it hard. I am not saying it has senses or intuition, it’s basically mimicking how humans can jot down the thinking process.
- With Reasoning added to LLMs and access to tools, code generation, it can do a lot of things for you. You can steer it in a debugging rubber duck and even log parser, data analyst, and whatnot to find, solve, and move from one state of confusion to a state of clarity, or at least some gaps to fill.
- LLMs have come a long way, we need to catch up with what LLMs can really do

Read

The lack of frequency increases the pressure to deliver quality
- Consistency is really helpful in writing or any action.
- I used to write 100 days of golang 2-3 times a month initially, but lost the consistency due to college and internship tasks, and then spiralled into me not being confident and pressured on the quality aspect, ,procrastination and fear seeping in.
AI-assisted search
- AI-assisted search is really revolutionizing the google search, its a tool call at the end of the day, but the way it is executed and prompted is really an art.
- Gemini seems to be rocking at this. It was obvious that Google who has been ruling the search for the past 2 decades, will rule the next search too, but Open-AI and Preplexity had led the revolution. Just like Mozilla had it for browsers, then Chrome tookover.
What to work on next?
- Types of work laid out in priority order, obviously it depends on the situation at hand, and the instructions and alignment with your manager.
We’ll always need junior programmers
- We need to work hard and show the flame of curiosity that’s the deal.

Watched

Interview with Varun Mohan, Co-founder and CEO of Windsurf
- An insightful conversation with prompting questions which are quite relevant in today’s tech world
- He had a weird take on hiring, might be too overstrech employees’ health
  - Until the people are dehydrated, then we only look for help in terms of hiring. That is not a good way to put that, I think, it looks a bit cruel even if he might not mean it.
- Changing from GPU providers to AI Editor, betting on that is pretty dope.
What is MCP and how to use it: Fly.io
A pretty simple yet clear explanation of MCP. People are making fuzz and hype about it. Tool calling is simple why not stick to it, I guess the reason is every LLM provider has started to go with a different approach in that tool calling, so then it becomes a necessary thing to have a protocol.

Learnt

Tool Calling in Llama Meta AI API
- Was AI-pair-programming with Windsurf for getting this API wrapper for making Agent agnostic, and so far it seems to be good with the agent experience, just chat-based.
- However, the tool-calling bit is a bit tricky since the API is only chat-based, will be streaming this weekend to complete that.
Gemini 2.5 models are pretty good
- I was stoked to see the thinking capabilities it has, now beyond Chat GPT for normal, quick questions. I use Gemini to debug some weird edge cases and bugs, too.

Tech News

Tech God has listened to me, no major releases in LLMs this week 🥳

Finally, some time to absorb the things that have happened and shifted in the past month, evaluating the capabilities of LLMs at this stage.

For more interesting articles, check out the hackernewsletter for the week edition #743, for even more software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from the #39th week of this newsletter. It was a slow-down week and finally will be streaming over the weekend for interesting stuff. See you next time.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading.

Happy Vibe Coding :)

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #38

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #38

A week after ages, I finally had some energy, some spark back. I am actually overwhelmed with this AI revolution, too many ideas, too little mental space, its just moving too fast. Like I feel, I was just in this newsletter yesterday, and here I am a week gone with so many things launched, dropped, and bomb shelled.

Speed in the AI Revolution

Yes, AI launches feel like a bomb shell being dropped, in a good way, but can someone tell these AI companies to take a breath? At this pace, we all will be juggling models all the time. New models every week, deprecation of previous models, new ways to interact with tools, it’s just creating an endless cycle of progress. Yes, we might be progressing in better human intelligence,e but at the cost of letting too many possibilities just dying out due to speed.

Speed is good, but over-speeding or over-of-anything is bad. And the AI revolution is just too speedy, its not letting people take time and create, it’s bombarding with its possibilities. I might be wrong here, you might see very tiny progress being made, yes that is also true, but the amount of content being generated around this and filtering the noise is too hard right now.

Anyways, enough of that big ramble, I might continue this in a separate post altogether where I will distill this thought.

Personal Update

On the personal update side, I was full of energy this week. Open-AI just partnered with WindSurf to provide the 4.1 models access for free for a week. And I was not going to miss out on that, so I gave it a shot at vibe coding. it was fun to say the least, it did everything (rightly, maybe not completely though). This vibe coding is not bad if you know what you are doing, and at times, at AI fails, you can always steer it.

I also edited and recorded a mammoth 52-minute video, a one-shot voice-over. That brings me joy, from 6 6-minute video taking 3 hours to 1 1-hour video taking just over an hour to add voice over, that is a win for me.

Vibe Coding Experience

I did some digging in the codex cli, I gave windsurf a shot to create this cli in Python, and it did, but it was not what I expected; it just wrapped the API call in a cli. That also might have taken me a few hours, but AI did that in a few minutes, impressive stuff. It’s not like waiting and staring at it code, but rather, nudge, debug, and steer the conversation to progress. It’s more of you driving it to do what you want to do and let it handle the decisions to reach there, no, how granular you want the autonomy that you can always do, so:

Lesser autonomy> Use inline completion that Tab tab thing, it’s kind of good at doing that
More Autonomy> Use the chat interface to talk through the solution to it and let it create. Here, it’s not that great. The more specific you get, the less it grasps. The coherence is a little dicey here
- Maybe this is good for an initial prototype. It removes that staring at a blank page, you will have something to fix, something to fight the way for

This needs more time and experience to comment on, but I have been doing a similar thing at work, and most of the time it’s me who has given the direction for the LLM to take, and it's helping me find out things and narrow down my search space and effort.

Overall, the week was pretty refreshing and exciting. Learnt a lot of things, which you can read more about.

Quote of the week

"If everything is important, then nothing is."
— Patrick Lencioni

In this AI hype, everything seems to draw attention, and after attention is all you need.

But is it? Every model seems to be different in some or the other way, however good or bad it may be. In the last month itself, there are so many things launched, revealed, and invented that there is more than a year's worth of discovery to be done, let alone in the past year, we have decades worth of rundown content with us. But it’s just too unstable and fast.

If every AI company thinks their model is important and ground-breaking or SOTA (state of the art) for each of their new models, then I think none of them really are.

Isn’t that part clear to them, or are they just too busy to keep up with the AI Race? The latter seems likely, but who am I to comment on that? I can take my time to absorb the things happening and filter out the things myself from the noise and potential unimportant buzz and hype (maybe important later) out there.

Created

Appwrite Cloud Function Setup, creation, and deployment in Golang

I recorded a tutorial on setting up a cloud function, creating the function in golang, and deploying it to Appwrite Cloud via
- CLI
- Git
- Manual (gzip file)

Read

How to build an Agent
This was a simple article, but it’s so important to read. The things that we see around sometimes feel magical, people might just stare at them and remain in awe for eternity. However, people like engineers and Thorsten Ball (he is an author and engineer), who are fueled not just by skill but also by curiosity and the will to go a step ahead, maybe even two steps. Those types of people understand the craft, play with it (maybe fail several times), gain clarity, gain wisdom, and not just for selfish greed or promotion, they are wise and generous, they share it with others. Those are not humans, those are angels’ inspiration for all of us (at least for me)
Agents are not magic; they are LLMs with tools, and they can predict which word(token) to insert next in the sentence. Apply this to hand them the problem and some tools (functions, api calls, documentation, database), and they can understand what to look up for, what to do with it next, get the result, and decide again, in a loop. Just like that. Agents are just loops over an LLM call (at least in the broader way).
Our best customers are now Robots
UX > DX > RX
A nice way to put that
- We first cared about User experience with HTML and JavaScript.
- Then Developer experience with React and god knows what frameworks
- Now, Robots’ experience with LLMs in the picture, we have MCP, A2A, and again,n god knows what will drop tomorrow
Tech is changing fast as hell.
The Best Programmer I know

It is a manual on how to become a better programmer, I can really stick the headings of the post a goals to improve as a developer.

Believe it’s going to work even though it probably won’t
Startup founders are strong-headed, which is what I also agree upon. And like everything in life, it is a double-edged sword. Everything has pros and cons, but to not be cut by the other edge, you have to sharpen the other; you can’t dismiss the other edge but keep on sharpening the other one.
Sorry, that was a weird tangent. Startup founders need to be strong-headed because it’s their dream to build and grow; if they stop defending themselves, then the team just disintegrates.

Watched

Raising an Agent Episodes 1 and 2
Sourcegraph is such an open company, open as in the openness about their thinking and approaches. They are heading in a good direction, I think and they might be a fundamental step in something that no one else is noticing yet. They are taking the time and not rushing through the model race. I am betting on them now, a comeback is right around the corner.

Firebase makes an AI IDE? Firebase Studio
App builders are good, but not there yet.
Authentication, coming soon!
That was a hilarious dev-like builder. So relatable.
It now makes sense, as it is trained on real developers’ data, so if you know, you know.
And that brings a relief as well, as to the question of it replacing developers. That’s just not happening, as developers have not yet figured out their lives yet.

Learnt

Please use f-strings instead of old format strings in Python: Save yourself from questioning your existence
Man, this bug is lethal. If you have lets say a logger function that takes in a log string and arguments. You might be questioning your existence in debugging those errors. Since this is pretty nasty to use in logs, as we tend to looks for logs to find the errors. But if the logs itself are causing the issue, then good luck in finding where on earth the code is failing. Please use f-strings and save yourself from this madness TypeError: not enough arguments for format string
Vibe coding with Windsurf
- Windsurf let’s you prompt and generate, edit and delete files, execute commands and even debugging the errors.
- Its a good place to start, and then take control yourself. I just found it best for getting the boilerplate (too basic CRUD) steps and the UI parts. For other complex operations, it can’t vibe yet.
Intuition Vibe debugging with Chat GPT
- I had this above bug and there was try catch expression. The error must be in the middle code of it, but the logs that should have been there weren’t there. That made me wonder what the heck is happening.
- I tried to replicate the issue locally and found that we weren’t using the standard logger; it was a custom implementation of a logger. And then I suspected that is where it might be breaking.
- Then I went a bit deeper in the implementation of the code and asked gpt to verify that the place I suspect the issue is. And I was correct.
- This is am terming as Intuition vibe debugging, as a developer, you know what to expect and what not to, you can save time (and right now tokens) for LLM to do that for you, you can narrow down the search space and let it verify your intuitions. A lethal combination so far.
- I have not only used it once or twice, but several times, while checking the accuracy of ground truth and predictions, analyzing logs, filtering issues among the noise, and so many another trivial but too manual kind of operations that consume time and energy.

Tech News

AI is truly breaking the world, every day there is a new model, new shiny tools, new way to approach things. So much so that it has become really overwhelming to take a deep breathe and listen, observe, learn in this cluttered and shiny, noisy world.

Open AI releases 4.1 4.1-mini, 4.1-nano breaking the accuracy of 4.5
Open AI also releases o3 and o4-mini
Google releases 2.5 Flash

Next week, Antrophic will release something, that is my forecast, because we haven’t witnessed a week where there has been without a model release. I am excited but overwhelmed and scared as shit at the same time.

Let us breathe!

For more interesting articles, check out the hackernewsletter for the week edition #742, for even more software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

That’s it from this edition of the newsletter, see you next week (hopefully no AI releases this week, like just stop for a week)

Happy Coding :) (maybe happy vibing now)

Techstructive Weekly #37

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #37

A bit of a hectic week. For the past quarter, the weeks have been quite rough, and this is continuing this month too. Need to really breathe air, and take my mind off for a while. But something hurts to quit and take a rest. Bad habits are really hard to break, like not creating a video is becoming my bad habit, really deciding to take action and actual action is the biggest difference.

But somehow we are trapped in the fear of taking action and people still judge us because we spent time and failed, instead someone tried too little effort, still managed to get over the hurdle, or someone worked too hard to get it done. And I lie in the middle, torn between duty and burnout.

Anyway, it’sbeen a bit frustrating week so far, just need to divert my mind to other places and get back on track for video creation and learning up the hill.

Quote of the week

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."
— Dorothy Parker

Curiosity is the fire, that can kindle life’s biggest paths. I have started reading tiny experiments books, so far it seems that just having no clarity in life, but having curiosity and figuring out on the way is the way of life. For me, some things were luxury at one time, but suddenly in a moment they've become the only option to get out of the puddle I am in. Life is a bit drastic, curiosity is the fire that will keep one alive in the darkest of times.

Wrote

TIL: Add hunks/patches in a single file with git add -p

It was a TIL actually, I was just frustrated to open VS Code, I had already made the next changes and wanted to fix a bug, this helped fix the code without me reverting the local changes.

Read

Power to the people: How LLMs flip the script on technology diffusion:
This is a nice article written by AI Lord Andrej Karpathy, this nicely explains the current situation of the AI trend and how it is the reverse of every other revolution. An interesting perspective to think of and be grateful for living in this phase.

We won’t hire a junior engineer with 5 years of experience
This is a bit scary like I am new and haven’t contributed significantly to anything. I have the fire, but life gets in the way. I am not a person who would give excuses. I truly am confused with life lately. The trajectory of the engineer will be seen in the early days so accurately put.
Universal basic dead-end
We are in the AI revolution right now, just like how we had the computer revolution. People thought, everyone would lose their jobs, but are we out of jobs? In fact, there are more jobs than ever. Right now, yes the market is bad, and the jobs are fewer, but does that mean AI will replace humans? If yes, you are in the wrong world.

Watched

Model Context Protocol
MCP buzz is all over the place. But think above and beyond the hype. The core question is why do we want LLM to answer for us, its smart, but not very predictable.

Learnt

Using git add patch to add hunks and patches within a file
- We can use git add -p to add chunks (hunks? patches?) whatever that is called, to stage changes of a file and not the entire file

Tech News

Meta launches Llama 4 (actually games the lmarena)
Google drops some serious projects and protocol: Google Cloud Next 2025
- Firebase Studio
- Agent Development Kit
- A2A (Agent to Agent protocol)

For more interesting articles, check out the hackernewsletter for the week edition #741, for even more software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

So, let’s wrap up this week, which has been a bit harsh for me. Locking out on Friday from work at 10, no it was not forced, I was just curious to fix that damn bug. But alas despite all the efforts, the bug was not solved entirely, still the core remains making me feel a little sad but a bit satisfied as the major issue was resolved.

See you next week, Bye

Happy Coding :)

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #35

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #35

It has been quite a busy week, with some ups and downs at work. Another Friday release, a lot of patching and end-moment clutches to get it on time. I am not bragging, it is not good, but it is unavoidable at times, I am so proud of that I was able to deliver it, despite having a wired situation in life.

Life is tough, there was a rough day this week in my life, things just get worse and worse, and then get a little hope. That hope might be too tiny, not enough to heal the mind, but enough to carry life. It is tough, I need to stand and stay strong and find a way out because I am destined to be great.

I am receiving signs from the universe about the direction to go, but no matter how hard I try, even from the worse than me, they get results, but for me it just sucks, no response at all. Look at the post I created this week, 0 reactions, man! I put effort and it is not AI-generated, raw human emotion. Tough luck, but someone has said to do the job and not to focus on the result. That is what I am doing and leaving it as is.

Soon, it will change, soon I will be in the bliss of life.

Quote of the week

Robots generate, Humans manifest.

This is a quote I am making myself realize every time I have a problem to solve. I am a software developer, I get bugs, surely LLMs will generate some code, but I want to manifest the code, there is a difference. Humans can show things with emotion and work, AIs can’t do that, humans have feelings, but LLMs won’t have them.

Manifestation is far from generation, it needs a thought, it needs a raw emotion. Writing is not art, it is menial work, crafting stories is art; Generating images is not art, capturing memories, emotion, and expressions is an art; Speaking is not art, connecting, and resonating with emotion, is art; Writing code is not art, solving problems, expressing ideas is. You are a human, whatever you will create will be art. Keep crafting, keep exploring.

Created

I wrote 1 article, published 1 video (finally after almost 2 months), and 2 live streams.

Wrote

A letter for someone who is afraid of AI (including myself)
- I focused on Manifestation vs Generation
- Robots will generate, and Humans will manifest
- Humans need to keep getting good at the craft, leverage AI to make it faster and more efficient

Recorded

SmolAgents: Simple and Lightweight Library for creating AI Agents in Python
I learned a lot, created a few examples
- Basic tools: Multiply and add (call me silly, but LLMs can’t add)
- Specific tools: Scrape a website and list all the links and content
- Answering a user query from a DB
  - Generating the SQL query from Natural language
  - Executing the SQL query as a tool
- Using Local LLMs (llama3.2:1b and Gemma3:1b)
- Using Cloud LLMs (Mistral Small)

Streamed

Porting my Blog to burrow SSG + CMS
Made some tweaks and refinements in the UI and finally it is looking good.

Improving the burrow CMS
Was brainstorming on how to make the edit and delete functionality in the CMS i.e. the sync between the Git and Database

Read

Your manager should never have to ping you: This post discusses that a junior should be asking questions, updating too frequently, or over doing it, I get that point. The author is trying to make sure the manger is never left with suspicion or doubt about the junior “is he working on something?”, “is he even working?”, or “did he understand the problem right?”, because time is precious, and no one wants to waste time, and resources in rabbit holes. Rabbit holes are great but not always and too much of them can deviate you from the problems in a broken way. So I agree with this advice, however, think before dropping the message, don’t try to spam, avoid jargon and I think the communication needs to be to the point. I sometimes get too nerdy or too off-topic in some discussions, that we have to get on a call, yes that happens. No one is perfect, everyone is figuring out life.
Learn to Code: Kache’s Twitter (X) article: This just blew my mind. If someone is optimistic and pessimistic about AI, this guy is just one the extreme end of optimism. Nothing wrong with it. Every coin has two sides, no one can perfectly balance both. But I was kind of doing that, and that was leading me nowhere, after reading this, I am nudged on to the optimistic side. Like I feel there is too much to be done for me, so little time. It just pumped me up.
The worst programmer I know: Yes, this is true. Some engineers or programmers do not actually work on something, but they make something work together. They are the hand-holders, the captains, the leads (not the tech lead, the leaders). That is one type of personality, and that is no right or wrong personality. Humans just are what they are, that’s what makes them humans. This brings me to another point, pair programming, oh! That is a charm, a secret little thing that somehow works wonders. Pair programming is a must, no matter what the scale of the organization is, it opens up the programmer’s mind in different ways, changes the perspectives of individuals, gives confidence, helps learn communication, eases the stress a bit, and makes programming more fun. I can go on, but that is an understatement for pair programming.
My 6 months with the GoTH stack: building frontends with Go, HTML, and a little duct tape: I have heavily done some Golang with HTML for my burrow SSG and CMS. I think at some point, I will have to leverage Templ and Tailwind, I am not a frontend guy, so you know. Templating is really a thing, that when you code in python doesn’t feel but in Go, it actually helps you understand what the heck is going on.
The Friday Deploy
My 6 months with the GoTH stack: building front-ends with Go, HTML and a little duct tape
I’ve been a fan of Go for the better part of 10 years now. Its simplicity and portability quickly earned it a place as my language of choice. But the frontend experience has always left something to be desired for me. While powerful, Go templates …
Read more
10 months ago · 5 likes · Tom Elliott
Deep vs Shallow Go Interfaces: Deep interfaces are really easy and flexible to understand which is really a good observation. The shallow interfaces are the ones that are quirky but unavoidable, we need to have some level of basement laid in order to make it work, otherwise ,it will be all deep interfaces with too many implementation trees. That I don’t like.
We should have more friction in our lives: Cassidy Williams Blog: I shared this with my own thoughts, and yes, we need to bring back some friction as well fiction (pun intended).

Watched

The Primeagen on the Lex Fridman Podcast
Man, that person is a legend.
I have only watched 1:30 hours of this, that is a 5-hour video, man!
- Addiction is something that feels like giving you satisfaction, but it never will, that is a great way to put it.
- Work Harder, not smarter! This is the new advice (instead of working smarter, not harder) Why? because, how would you know something is the optimal way to do it, before doing it? Skewed
Why is Google winning the AI race?
- Google has controlled the internet for the past 2 decades, and it has Data, some model science, and also now has some infrastructure (hardware). It will control the AI race, Apple is actually surprising in all of them but dominates none of them.
- Can apple make a comeback? Looks hard, but we have seen comebacks (Google was struggling with Bard, now it is toppling Open AI)
Git Scraping my own Newspaper
- That’s pretty interesting, git scrapper based newspaper, wow, I want to make this, I want to aggregate my favorite blogs and platforms to get the most up-to-date content. Content these days is overloaded.

Will YouTube ever run out of YouTube Ids?
- Wow, Youtube well thought out, 64 letters, that is a gigantic number, practically it will never run out of ids. However what if someone spams a few billion video uploads?? That can pretty quickly bring the limit close, I mean YouTube will surely block it, but maybe who knows

Learnt

Python’s wired pythonic expression: This I saw from Tsoding’s tweet
- The expression was
  70 * 2, 3
- Expected is `140, 3`
- But why sometimes, my brain thinks it should be 140, 210
- Maybe that is too pythonic, but that is not a tuple expression, It is just a singular expression, where there are two values evaluated
- However, if you do something like this, this makes it more sensible
```
> 70 * (2,3)
(2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3)
 
```
- Creating the tuple `(2,3)` 70 times
- Wired! Sometimes, you don’t have to overthink, just make the thinking a little grounded, there’s too many nuances to keep in the cognitive stack I think.
- Also, this makes it more clear, I think
```
> 70, 2 * 3, 5
70, 6, 5
```
Using smolagents with CodeAgent and ToolCalling agent
I was able to figure out what is the CodeAgent and ToolCalling Agent
- I was trying with the local LLM models those were pretty slow and kind of small (1 billion parameters) compared to the actual 100 billion and god knows how many billion is GPT
- Then I tried mistral on the cloud, generated an API key and everything started to work.
  - The code agent is for generating code, and not explicitly for calling tools
  - There is a separate tool calling agent for that named ToolCalling Agent
  - I tried both of these for their particular use cases
  - Tool calling agent for simple predefined things like scraping the website and getting the links, getting the content, multiplying and add (yes LLMs can’t do that for large numbers)
  - Code Agent for generating SQL queries based on the natural language for the query.
  - That was a great experience, this is what I love weekends for, trying, failing, failing hard, trying something new, trying hard, success. Finally a new error message.
Using default dict with some wired default expression
```
profile = defaultdict(lambda: {"name": "", "links": []})
```
- I didn’t know we could use a lambda expression to create this default value for any key in a defaultdict, I thought that was kind of limited with the built-in datatypes like dict, list, int, boolean, etc. But this opens a wider door for nested data structures. Safe access!

Tech News

A lot of AI News, AI is no more hype, it is a revolution, a moment of life for most of us.

AI News:

Can we breathe for a moment, like there is hardly any time left to check out the releases? At this point, the only way is to adapt and keep struggling and learning new things. Keep the curiosity firing.

For more interesting articles, check out the hackernewsletter for the week edition #339, for even more software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from the last week of March, the end of quarter 1 of 2025. It has been a quick-flowing time, AI is taking over quicker than anticipated, and the pace is quite rapid. In the blink of an eye, a new model, a new improvement, a new tool, is getting launched. Times are wild, and so will the effort.

Keep the curiosity flickering!

Happy Coding :)

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #34

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #34

It was a pretty busy and productive week. After three hectic weeks of research, hacking, scripting, implementing, Google Sheets, and Python Vulture coding an API, I made a few releases. Yes, that is the normal role of a software engineer at a startup. I get to wear multiple hats: analysing, writing, debugging, scripting, testing, and obviously communicating effectively.

I was able to complete the implementation successfully. The release somehow happened on a Friday evening, which I am skeptical about, but it happened without any hiccups, a few minor ones. It will all be well if it ends well.

Last weekend, I finally launched my own SSG and Blog, which I built with it. I am trying to move the site from meetgor.com to dev.meetgor.com. The site is running on GitHub pages and is built with the Burrow SSG.

A week, productive, and happy about whatever I learned so far. A lot of Python scripting, with pair programming with LLMs, google Sheets for finding accuracy numbers, API shenanigans, and some serious mode all the time. I like being serious, that’s my trait, I am not bragging, just saying.

Next week, I will be hopefully writing more and uploading a video or two about some stuff that I have been tinkering with.

Quote of the week

"It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up."
– Vince Lombardi

I have fallen several times, in the past few weeks, but I have always got up and kept going. It was hard, but facing guilt is more hard than the pain of falling. I can sit and cry, but that won’t get me anywhere, I am here to change my destiny, not to wait and let it unfold. I cannot change winds, but I surely can control the way I move.

Things are a bit different in tech right now, LLMs are everywhere, and they probably can do at par with a junior developer, but one thing is for sure they can’t. The curiosity, the internal fire that keeps a person alive, awake at night, forgetting the surroundings when debugging, this LLM can’t do yet! If you fall, we all do, get up and forget everything that happened, remember you can drive it, drive it better, change the way you react to failure, and don’t let it take over you.

Wrote

Wrote a few things, want to write more.

I will be writing more since I have set up my blog at dev.meetgor.com, it is served by my own Static Site generator using Golang and Netlify Cloud Functions hosted on GitHub Pages. I still need a few things to sort out which will do on the live stream.

I created this SSG in Golang from scratch (except for the markdown parsing) on live streams. This also has a CMS or an API that can add posts to the database and GitHub pages can sync up with the database and save the post to the GitHub repo.

Creating SSG from Scratch in Golang Playlist
Burrow: SSG + CMS in Golang (not a mature and ready-to-use project yet)

Feels really good about how the SSG came together, its really pluggable SSG with flexible JSON as well as YAML compatible frontmatter and configs. It has an editor that creates a post and stores it in the database, the GitHub workflow cronjob picks up the last edited or created post in the last hour and creates or updates the file in the GitHub repo.

Read

AI LLM Agents are just graphs, frameworks over-complicate things
This article shines like gold, it’s quite comprehensive and explains exactly what agents are. The code is precisely 100 lines of code which is surprising to me, was that intentional, or was that a good given luck.
- LLM decides for you
- The tools are rule-based or just procedural steps to execute
- Agents are like graphs, node,s and edges, one pointing to different directions after taking action or deciding what to do next.
  Pocket Flow
  LLM Agents are simply Graph — Tutorial For Dummies
  Ever wondered how AI agents actually work behind the scenes? This guide breaks down how agent systems are built as simple graphs - explained in the most beginner-friendly way possible…
  Read more
  10 months ago · 59 likes · 1 comment · Zachary Huang
Learn Go Templates: A practical guide to layouts, data rendering in Golang
It was a great article. It covered a lot of things in detail as well as digestible examples. I liked the explanation of template partials and functions. I might be using them in my ssg in Golang (burrow). There was one missing nuance, that is using a variable if inside a loop range and referencing with the $ to access the outer variables in templates.

Watched

1. AI is here, and yes you are screwed, as a junior: Article review by THE PRIMEAGEN:

I am here for the hot takes, I read this article last week and shared some thoughts I was completely agreed to the article as I am not sure about certain things, I lack some common sense I think, but yes THE PRIMEAGEN in GOD mode opened my eyes

If you are with people who are working for money, is usually good according to their experiences, which is fair, it sometimes it depends on the interaction with the person rather than the nature of the person. We sometimes get used to the nature of the person after some time.
Use LLM but understand what are you doing exactly
Copilot was great bump in the productivity of developers when it launched but since now we are used to the generated code, it seems like we get bad completion or it’s bad.
A good analogy for LLM's ability to code, the more precise you want to do certain thing, the better the generation is, and the broader the scope of the task, it messes up. Like give me the next 2 lines of code in the current position, that is good, LLM is really good at that (not always). But if you give i want to build this project, in an x and y way with a and b technology, that is where it might get a little screwed (Devin not mentioned but I heard the screams)
AI SaaS clones are shit and not true things, it is more than code, relation, care the bond. If someone is earning money for the SaaS clone they build with AI, then they might be building a silly problem for a silly user.
The point of juniors is that in the future they will pay off the investment they made.
That was too much maybe, a reaction of a reaction, no it’s a note for me.

Backend Banter with Mitchell Hashimoto:

I have watched it halfway through and so far some hot takes

Rust ecosystem is a little messed up to interact with for him at least
Zig fixes the pains of C, the build ecosystem (handles the compilation for us), and package management (like go)
Project-based learning for the win!!
He started to build Ghostty as a fun toy project, then found some pain points and tried to fix those with an ecosystem of libraries to build an abstraction layer of apps on top of terminal emulation.

Learnt

Scrollback editor mode in Zellij
This mode is GOD Mode for Vim nerds, it is really powerful that we can explore the logs from the editor. I used it to grep and search quickly through a long list of logs and filter, count, and extract some things out of the sea of logs. Highly recommend checking it out, might be handy in certain situations.
Format a JSON file in Vim with jq
I always had to open up VS Cod* for formatting the file, which is currently opened in neovim, since I have a low-spec laptop, VSC crashes down the machine, and sometimes also go the browser and pastes in a json frontmatter, but that sucks too. So this command using jq really solved my problem. I use jq frequently when I am outside of neovim, in the shell, however, when I am in the editor, I want it to be formatted immediately.
Using the difflib from Python standard library with SequencMatcher for fuzzy matching
I had been using rapidfuzz and other fuzzy matching tools for string matching. However, there is difflib in the Python standard library, which is really handy for quick simpler things. I found this while asking GPT for a particular thing and it gave me this difflib SequenceMatcher function to compare the two strings, and I was unsure of it at first, but I typed it and surprisingly my LSP picked up difflib, so I checked what is difflib and man that was a python standard library.

Tech News

Open AI releases new Audio Text to Speech API playground → openai.fm
This looks good, really good, podcasts, videos are a bit risky at voice now. Clearly, voice is now taking over with AI, text > images > voice > ??? This is going big.
Claude adds search on the web with generated output (only for Pro Users though)
I have no opinion on that since I have not tried it, but it seems like a great feature and must have since all other major LLMs are masters at this, especially Preplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT, etc.

For more interesting articles, check out the hackernewsletter for the week edition #338, for even more software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from this 34th edition of my weekly learning, I hope you enjoyed it, and leave comments on what you think about some of my takes or any feedback.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #33

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #33

Finally a bit of stress reliving week. After constant hustle at work, this week felt a little less stressful (not stress as that stress, just too much cognitive load to handle). However I made 2 releases happen, a few experiments and brainstorming for cracking a problem.

Work

This week made me realise, I sometimes do things. I was asked to figure out a metric that we need to provide to a customer based on their customers data, they basically need to understand the data of the customer, however the data is too much and they forward to us to extract and analyse on top of that. So, my job was to figure out the requirement of them, they need to understand the pattern in the data of the customer and that is not quite easy.

I did some analysing of our competitor data and it looked skewed, asked to ChatGPT, I cannot stress the use of interpreter mode enough. That just gave the LLM the superpower to understand its own mistake instead of us figuring out, and that saves a ton of back and forth. I passed the data and context to LLM and it gave somethings which really opened a eye and was then able to take further steps wit the guidance of my manager.

That was a rewarding thing, I don’t know what, that feels like a new way of solving problems. I feel excited when that quick prompt is able to guide me in the direction of the actual problem than sifting through the data.

Quote of the week

“You can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.”
— Albert Einstein

Think out loud, but don’t let that hold you back in the actual work. We need a approach, a mindset fresh from the problem, if you created a problem, its more likely you have the same mindset to solve it, however that won’t get you out, you need to take a step back and understand the cause.

Read

Yes you are screwed: That was a eye-opening article. In the age of LLM, as a junior developer, we need to act, respond with curiosity rather than doubt or ignorance.
Porting Typescript compiler to Golang: That is givign them 10x boost in time, that is insane for compilers, I mean time doesn’t really matter in compilers but for developer productivity that helps a lot.
Building Websites with LLMs: This was a really a nice post, need to add this to my blog as well. I want to write more and the more I write I will create more sections like TILs, Thoughts, Link Blog, Articles, Series, Tags, and we can go on, I want to keep my existing site simple yet, I want to organise them in a susinct way.

Wrote

Notes on Gemma 3
Inspired from Simon wilson, I also did some experiments on the new model, on my phone as well as on laptop. Running a LLM on phone feels like magic.
Meet's Substack
Notes on Gemma 3
Google announced a new family of models, which are open-sourced weights and have 4 variations of the parameters, 1, 4, 12, and 27 billion parameters. Leaving the 1 billion parameter, the rest 3 parameters are multi-modal, they support images and short videos…
Read more
10 months ago · Meet

I also streamed on weekend, one stream for wrapping the static site generator with cron job on github, and the next stream for contributing to posting with file uploads.

Watched

Thinking/Planning vs Building: This was a cool video, I was always with hands-on approach when it comes to developing anything. However since the last year, having the company of my manager, I got into the habit of thinking and sketching out the plan for the implementation, maybe that is different, we don’t create a document, we just brainstorm on the idea. Making the logic clear.
I also like the direct code implementation, to get a taste of what works and what is the actual problem to solve than to guess and later realise the problem was to pick stones than to carve the stone.
LLM Chat Apps are driving Theo insane: Hire Theo please, OpenAI, Claude, Meta. the design is really falwed, too unintutive and buggy at time. They are multi billion dollar company, they can’t afford this mistakes.
Overview of Marimo:
Marimo is a powerful tool to have in these times. LLMs are chained and this will help build better workflows, rather help in experimentation and iteration. Having to work with graph related scripts, with graph designed platform is the best way to move ahead.

Learnt

Using marimo to create,edit and work with python based notebooks. Marimo is a modern alternative to jupyter notebooks, you can port a ipynb file to marimo, as marimo stores directly as a python file. That is really neat. Marimo’s core feature, or I should say selling point is the reactive system. If you change a value of one variable in a cell, then all the cells referring that variable will be mutated, or changed. That is actually cool, and makes notebooks intuitive to use. I’ll be exploring more of those these weekend.
Debugging a textual app with the textual dev console: I was livestreaming the implementation of file upload in posting app and needed to debug the process, and the following command actually made it super easy to do that:
```
> textual console 

> textual run --dev posting.__main__:cli
```
HTTPX request structure for uploading files in the request. As I was trying to figure out the fix for uploading file in posting app, httpx is the library used under-the-hood to send and save request. Hence I felt the need to look up how to parse files into the httpx request object.
Curl uses `@` for indicating a file upload in a request form data. That is like a decision they have made, a choice, that could be something else as well. However the community is supportive and adheres to the convention that is followed in all the places, rather the systems are designed around it.

Tech News

Open AI Releases Tools: They added the response API, which is suitable for Tool based calls. Web and File Search, as well as Computer use for automating stuff. This is pretty significant thing to be honest, in the direction of agentic revolution. These tools and ease of adoption will boost the landscape of this agentic hype.
Google releases Gemma 3: Google released gemma 3 with 4 variation models of 1b, 4b, 12b, and 27b parameters. 4,12 and 27 are multi-modal supporting image parsing, have 128k context window, also support tool calling. I wrote some notes on this.

Phew, I did a good comeback after 2 weeks of complete slump. That was it for a bit busy week in tech. It has been quite a lot, models released as usual, transformative adoption of tools for agentic workflows.

Techstructive Weekly #32

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #32

Weeks of chaos have left me on the brink of burnout, with no time to breathe or reflect. Didn’t get much time to just sit and think, just had to complete a few hacks here and there to get the demo running, poor management and blind eyeing.

I am a bit stressed at the moment, not able to do anything, occupied in work from 9 to 12. Yes, that is a bit stressful and hectic to carry this daily.

Just raw thoughts in the start, feels a bit embarrassing but it is the reality. Have not uploaded a video since 4 weeks, will be 5th week this weekend if not uploaded. I am not worried about the number but I am trying to say how life is playing with me currently.

Too bad to be true.

I learnt a lot, not saying no to that, but at what cost? My entire week? This is what I do 24x7 apart from 8 hours of sleep? Maybe not.Its hard to answer and take a decision at the moment, since my only responsibility is to lift myself out of some situation.

Enough ramble, I did a lot of llm prompts, python all over.

Quote of the week

"The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do."
– B.F. Skinner

At this juncture, I might not think, but I should have context on what to do. Figuring out the actual problem from the fuss, and then boiling that down to simple technical problems is something I need to work on. I realized this a lot over the past couple of weeks.

LLMs can think provided the human had did a bit of thinking at first. It is just going to predict the next word or code, based on what is already there in the internet, however some things are created of pure intuition and wisdom that is the one that will set someone apart from others.

Read

Why is everyone trying to replace software engineers: I had my first meeting where there were clients, actual users of the product. And I was a technical guy so not much needed for me to talk just demo the things, went a bit technical and in a jiffy but thats it, I think we will be replaced with the people who can understand the business better and not by any LLM. True.
Beware of the Makefile Effect: Adding already solved problem to your code is not bad, but randomly yanking and making a saphagetti of the codes surely is a problem. But the counter point to that would be, how to know if the thing we are copying is actually good, that sense need to be developed and I think that comes with time and experience and mistakes.

Watched

Really didn’t had much time to watch anything. On saturday and sunday though I watched the How to use LLMs by Andrej Karapathy. I mentioned this last week as well but this week I watched it completely.

ChatGPT Interpreter
Grok AI unhinged mode
Custom GPTs
Internet Search Tool

This was really insightful, I tried a lot of things, and one thing or the other really helped me solve so many intricate bugs and discrepancies.

Learnt

We can use ChatGPT to debug the code, just provide the source file and could run and understand what to do and figure out issues
Also the interpreter mode can be used to provide a data source file and allow it to compute a few things to cross-validate with our code, this really saved me hours of debugging and quickly point out the issues, here is one conversation where the numbers were slightly off from my code and it helped me figure out that that was actually an issue in the data source and not in my code.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67c93174-2eb8-8011-b23c-e9651dffa91e
Providing a larger system prompt is powerful and we could cramp a lot of boilerplate data or any data source that instead goes into user prompt to save tokens. This is really powerful if we are making one shot calls, and not a chat like conversation systems.

Thoughts

Just a thought that might give you some insights and can make you think about somethings in a different way.

Writing LLM Prompts is the new writing code, we need to spend time thinking about different approaches for prompt and less on the code, as LLM would generate the code.

This is just my thought, I think I could write a article on it.
Next week I have 3 articles in mind

Use positive conditions
Python is tactile and golang is mechanical
Prompt is the new code, worry about the art of prompt rather than code

Tech News

Mistral OCR: This LLM things are taking over everythign slowly, every domain of things will now have LLM-equivalent, what do we call it? LLMfying, LLMing, GPTing, AIng, LLMify, ok enough jokes, but this is seriously good.
X let’s you query grok by mentioning it in reply: That is wild, I just got access to GrokAI App on my phone and its blazingly fast. Really that LLM is different from others, not much but a little open.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from this 32nd edition of my weekly learning, I hope you enjoyed it, and leave comments on what you think about some of my takes or any feedback.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #31

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #31

What a week, again, a bit of thump and bumps, a bit of scare at work.

Last week was hectic, this week was continuing that bump in increased responsibilities. I think I might be transitioning from Junior to Senior, but the mindset might be of a junior, need to step up.

Might be the first time I felt a bit pressured, making me doubt myself, negative thoughts, quitting decisions, etc are flowing in my mind. Nothing bad, just wired stuff happening in life, it’s tough to live life sometimes, its hard to show it, no one knows what you and your family is going through in life, before they lash out and ruin it further. No one has patience and empathy anymore.

See, days are bad, were good before, its just time, and it shall pass. Test of patience and my temperament, I need to focus and avoid taking a rash decision immediately. A emotion-ed mind is vulnerable to bad decisions and ruining the hard word laid off in the past. Stay calm, don’t stop, but let the storm pass, before you sense the direction, because the direction might be wrong anyways.

Quote of the week

“Don’t look back, you’re not going that way.”
— Mary Engelbreit

Life will give you moments that you think will haunt you, that time, you’ll look back and say, if only I could change that. Nope, don’t look back, reflect yes. Don’t overthink and regret, just pause, understand what went wrong, deep breathe, it’s ok we are all learning, I had done this mistake, admit and move ahead.

Life is too short, to enjoy the past ride, enjoy the current landscape, AI, LLMs, AI Agents, Model Context Protocol, so many things to learn. Don’t corner yourself and feel restrictive about mistakes or disappointments, think about what excites you, get that habbit and embrace it.

Read

A blog, If you can keep it
Getting a blog post featured at hackernews, hmm, I always wonder how a post gets featured at hackernews, does the author submit it to the site, or the community post it there? Really curious about the working of it.
Personal Software is becoming a trend
Wasn’t this the hobby of software developers from the beginning, we try to solve problems and eventually land up a project a software for our own nerdy needs.
Initial impression of GPT 4.5: Simon Wilson
This model looks worse, no comments. Haven’t tried yet, but this commentary gave a good gist about what to expect.

Watched

How I use LLMS - Andrej Karapathy
I have partially watched the video, found it a bit interesting and will continue to watch over Saturday.
Indirect Prompt injection in LLMs - Numberphile
This is really interesting, I mean corrupting the data source is so easy, write a few blog posts, publish on the internet and source it in your RAG and let hallucination be in the peek. What a problem to have, more advancements, more harder problems to solve. Man! becoming a security person is valuable then ever.
Legion AI Agent Framework
This frameworks looks so like other frameworks, not sure why make one so much fuss about. I mean I get it, for learning purposes it is so cool, even I would like to try making one, but committing to it as a publicly available project as a real project and not a silly side project, seems a engagement bait or something. Just do it man.

Learnt

Use positive conditions (or names or end variable names) instead of negative conditions
- For example if you have to control the case of a string, i.e. upper of lower case, use the parameter case_sensitive=True instead of ignore_case=True. The word ignore impacts the thinking and messes up the logic inside of head and lead to mistakes while writing, however more on the reading code.
- This lesson I have read a few places and now I see why it is important. I will write a short rambling advice post on my blog soon this weekend.
Continue as you like it is the word for LLMs to continue after you added a prompt that gets rejected by the LLM
Writing python is like tactile keyboard and writing golang is mechanical keyboard. Food for thought for next week, one more blog post to be written.
Pivot table in google sheets. A real handy way to sort out and do data analysis from other sheets, or I should say master data.

Tech News

GPT 4.5 Released: Ah! another week another model, another brag on 23% improvement while others are already 50% through. Open AI its game over.
Claude 3.7: Antrophic is leading now. These are massive gains in coding models. The AI Race is wild. The speed at which we are moving, we’ll see AGI next week.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Techstructive Weekly #30

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #30

What a week captain! Realized this on Wednesday truly. A bit of exhausting yet exciting week, it was a wild ride, true but learnt a lot. A lot of mistakes popping up at once.

I had to scamper and get things done, not just do it, but do it correct, not only do it correct , but also do it more, that was exaggerated, but yes, it was a bit taxing at some point, but the reward? I don’t care, I did my best (to some extent) and I am leaving the result to nature, really can’t control that now. A lot of intense debugging sessions, pair programming, side scripting, a lot of fun conversations and moments, it was worth it.

I again didn’t stream and upload any videos or articles this week, and probably won’t do this weekend either. A tough month February 2025.

Quote of the week

"It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up."
— Vince Lombardi

Yes, this is how I feel right now. Knock me down, you’ll see me again standing up, struggling, yes, quiting, nope, never. I mean I am not saying I don’t give up, but I know when to give up and when to press on. I know which battles to fight and which to leave, it’s not worth it sometimes.

Read

Why Blog if nobody reads it?
This is a good post, why write articles when no one reads them. According to spirituality or philosophically, do work without caring for the result. But is writing articles is work? or hobby? Either of them, just do it because you have or need to or just so. Really there is no answer, will this universe be affected if you write or not write that post? Probably not, will it impact you, probably yes in a good way, will drain some time but I can guarantee after 3 years of blogging, you will have a better understanding (at least something) from what you had before writing. Just write it.

Watched

Nothing

A bit of hectic week as said, not much time for

Learnt

If you want to send a pure json response from API, and if for some reason, you code deals with numpy or dataframe in that case, then you might get into problems if not handled correctly. If you don’t convert or cast the lower level values (int64, char, etc used by numpy low level C) into python data types then you might get errors while decoding back to json. So make sure you cast back to higher level types. Had to debug for 3 hours to figure out where the heck the issue is coming from.
What is the better approach to find a sub-string match with a list of keywords.
So, let’s say I have a string
this is a large language model
and a sub-string to be found
language model
If language model is present then it is good, but let’s say the string is truncated to
this is a large language mod
In this case language mod is partially in language model it should still be allowed, however it’s a bit tricky and have tons of edge cases covering various strings.

Tech News

LlamaCon: Meta has announced the first tech conference for AI/LLM.
Grok 3 Released: Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, late on Monday released its latest flagship AI model, Grok 3, and unveiled new capabilities for the Grok iOS and web apps. This comes in twitter / X as a chat access. LLM is now like a search button everywhere.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Techstructive Weekly #29

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #29

It was a fun week. There was a bit of laziness, for sure, but also some work done. I didn’t create a video this week and took a bit of a break. I think it is as important to upskill as it is to maintain streaks of uploading.

Quote of the week

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."
— Alvin Toffler

This hits well. With AI in town, AI will require you to learn the art of debugging, unlearn things like copy-pasting from the Internet, and change your perception of code and technology.

It will be less about learning, and more about re-learning or removing the perceptions about the already existing things while writing code. The technology is moving fast and with AI it will pick up pace like never before, code will be a mess, and codebases will be doomed, but someone with an open mindset, and a person who knows his craft will surely survive.

Read

ASDF has been re-written in Golang from BASH: This is nice, I also used to write a lot of bash scripts in my initial novice days, like downloading data, virtual environment management, utilities, etc. but over the years I moved from script kiddie to python and golang scripts, as I have more control and it works for a lot more edge cases then figuring out string parsing on bash.
How we replaced our react frontend with Golang and Webassembly:
This is the second thing I am heard about Golang this week, moving from X to Golang in some way or the other. The adoption rate of Golang is high and it makes sense, it is a simple language. Simple to read and write, and the one that scales as well.
My writing process, and how I keep it sustainable:
I am inspired by this article, the author claims to write everything in one go (not everything but the meat of the post) that is true for me. I just flush out my thoughts in one sitting too, however, my editing process is haywire, and haphazard. I usually don’t revise, I am not a professional technical writer, but when I do I do editing as they come.
A slow blogging year: Wow, I also need to do some posts this year, I moved from 41 (2021), 40 (2022), 11 (2023), and 14 (2024). Need to write more, On the initial day, I had too much to express, but as days progressed, the friction reduced but the quality of that increased, first, it was about quantity, the motivation, and then it was consistency about improving.

Watched

How (junior) developers are getting screwed:
I agree with this point, AI is a double-edged sword. If used properly it is a weapon, but if used without knowing what it is doing, it would not help in the long run. But for junior developers, it is quite hard to figure out why without AI ,leave it aside with AI, it will be a new skill to add moving ahead in a few years. How to use AI effectively as a developer, previously which was searching, debugger, and documentation, next it will be one more tool in the toolbelt.

Learnt

Learnt about qute browser
- Load and save sessions
- Map keybindings from commands
Using request.arg.to_dict to get the query parameters as a dictionary of string with the list of values in Flask APIs

Tech News

Golang 1.24 released: I have created 3 videos about splitsequence, json omit tag, and weak package.
OpenAI roadmap: This is big, the GPT-5 will be the last model for GPT family, i.e. the next models will be thinking-based and not just predicting the next token-like models, I mean those will be token prediction only but the way the final token will come as final will be lot more nuanced and not silly. Instead of us prompting it again (this is wrong, what about this <placeholder> case??) it will think thoroughly and give the result.
GitHub Copilot language server

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Leave a comment

That’s it from this 29th edition of my weekly learning, I hope you enjoyed it, and leave comments on what you think about some of my takes or any feedback.

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #28

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #28

This week was a bit frustrating, but I really want to continue what I am working on. However, life is pushing me in a different direction, and I am so confused. I have responsibilities to perform and situations to tackle. It is a bit hard to live ahead, but I will stay with my three pillars: curiosity, consistency, and grit.

This week, I created one video, and that’s it. It was just a bit of a hectic weekend, so I didn’t have much free time. However, on weekdays, I was able to learn about subdomains, LLMs, and more. I read a lot about writing, and at this point, I am overwhelmed with writing advice. I think it is high time to write consistently.

Quote of the week

“
Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try.
”
— Gail Devers

I feel a bit overwhelmed as to what should I be doing, I have so many things going on:

100 Days of Golang (38 articles completed)
Youtube Channel (~50 subscribers) | 20 videos
Writing Novels (soo many ideas, overwhelmed to start on one)

Each idea requires some intense planning and execution steps, however, I work full-time as a software developer, which is also a mentally draining process. Managing all of these things at once will burn me out instantly, but have kept pace for the past 6 months, and continue to do so. However, I want to make it a bit structured and habitual rather than a hap-hazard way of poking everything at once, which ends up having nothing accomplished and still burned out.

I took that quote and rambled, but I need to pick direction now, I have a sense of speed, but the direction is more important here. I will be analyzing where I will be heading this year this week.

Created

Turso CLI Guide: Interacting with LibSQL databases on the Turso platform
- I just created the first video on ShotCut tool, a local video editor. I have been using Clipchamp for video editing, this was the first video created on Shotcut.

No streams the previous weekend, I didn’t stream for the first time in I guess 12 weeks. I started in November and did it constantly for the past 3 months, and broke the streak the previous weekend. I was out of energy and had to go out for several hours, so ended up not doing the streams.

I will be doing one this weekend though.

Read

So I rolled my own Static Site generator: This is an interesting read, I also touched on static site generators in Golang through live streams. I didn’t write the markdown parser for now, I am planning to do it at some point. I really want to understand how parsers work, I thought that was not the right time to write my own markdown parser, so just used a library.
How Serverless is killing the traditional backend role: I agree with this, the backend developer role is shifting towards DevOps and Operations oriented tasks rather than writing from scratch things. This will rapidly evolve in my opinion with LLMs writing the code and at some point, the backend will just be a black box that is hardly touched with code, just a few knobs and switches to make changes.
How to write better tests in Go: This was a nice overview of how to structure tests and the mindset of writing test cases.
Top 10 Clean Code Rules: This was also an insightful read, specifically writing the positive conditionals instead of negative ones is so relatable and correct in many ways. The code should be simple to read, I can feel how much I have to stress and put a thought when determining the correct condition when the negation is introduced in the condition.

Watched

Memory management Course from Boot.dev by Teej Devries
I am watching this course and so far it looks dope. The time that TJ has put in will be gold, I am also planning to take the course on boot.dev.

Alpine JS by Dreams of Code:
This was a great crash course on Alpine JS, I think I might use it for creating web apps where I need some interactivity without writing javascript, htmx is good, but yes interactivity is done with Alpine JS.

Learned

Tina CMS setup: I set up the dev.meetgor.com with TIna, it is a work in progress. I have learned quite a few things, and want to create videos and articles about it, but can’t find the right mental space to do things like this. I also created AI agents with langgraph, but have not gotten a free mental space to jot the learnings together.
Setup subdomains on Hostinger with a Domain-only Plan: I was reading a blog of an author and found some hiccups on their website, some missing links, and redirects, this made me wander to the domain world. I began searching for domains, subdomains, and free hosting. I finally ended up at this article, and it opened a huge world of possibilities, I had the ability to create subdomains on my domain meetgor.com, but never knew that I thought to do that, I had to purchase the hosting plan. Very nice marketing by Hostinger, clever. But, I am a developer and searching is my weapon.

Tech News

GitHub Copilot Agent: This looks like an actual agent for an editor/IDE. Yes, developers are on the verge of getting jobless (I think I have heard that for quite some time now), where is Devin, he might be scared!
Gemini 2.0 is Generally available: I have read this a much more better and cheaper model then it’s competitors. But the only reason I am afraid of its adoption is google’s ability to throw it in the graveyard. I have seen bard go that route as well, so I no more trust Google on the product’s reliability.

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Leave a comment

That’s it from this 28th edition of my weekly learning, I hope you enjoyed it, and leave comments on what you think about some of my takes or any feedback.

Techstructive Weekly #27

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #27

It was a bit of lazy day, not that lazy though, did a lot of things while being lazy. I had been doing a lot of things in the past few weeks, so this week I decided to take things a little slowly. If I just keep on being that productive, it would be a burnout soon.

So, I created a new kind of video using a presentation-style approach, wrote a bit of python, and debugged it a ton, and now I see why tests are handy. I don’t have to debug the issue every time I make a change here, If run tests, I know exactly which test failed and where to look out for so easily.

I started an initiative to write something for an hour, I did just once a day, the other day’s life took over me.

Quote of the week

"Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you."
– Anne Lamott

Yes, I just took this week slowly. I took deep gazes and deep writing, want to have silent walks next week. Recharging the creative batteries before they go out. It is important to charge up and slow down simultaneously in my opinion, rather than waiting for yourself to drain away.

Created

What is a programming language?
I created this video as just a way to express my thoughts and the knowledge I have been gathering over the past few years. It might look silly, but it solidifies what I already about the thing I think I know.

Read

How AI might change programming?
THis is such a insightful post, so many things to excite yourself with, so many questions to satisfy your hunger of curiosity with.
Register Spill
How might AI change programming?
AI will change programming. I’m convinced of it now…
Read more
a year ago · 21 likes · 9 comments · Thorsten Ball
How I am moving away from Google Ecosystem: This is quite straightforward post, I see a lot of things missing like f-droid instead of Play Store, but it was quite helpful. I don’t use Mail that extensively and I think Gmail is not a bad thing. Others are good too, not sure of their privacy reasons.
GO’s wired little iterators
I have just skimmed through this post, haven’t really read it entirely but I think it will be important to go through.
A year of writing
This was a practical post.
- Publishing requires courage
- Fear can be overcome by practise
- Hobby of creation will over do the activity of consumption
  Organizing Automation
  A year of writing
  As the year comes to an end, it is a natural time to reflect on all of the things I have done. One new hobby I picked up in 2024 was the writing this blog. I’m taking some time to reflect, for my own understanding and also to help out others who might be considering the same…
  Read more
  a year ago · 2 likes · Milan van Stiphout

Watched

Exploring DeepSeek’s approach to LLM on Computerphile
This was a great video explaining the key difference on how Deepseek did the LLM game differently, a concept called MoE mixture of experts. A network where the LLM will branch out to a specific network where it can use the weights more efficiently instead of the entire weights. Nice thinking, this feels so high-level view, how exciting or frustrating it would be to do that in a low-level and actually hands-on with the actual model.
Martin Fowler on Refactoring Podcast
Golden hour, this just changed my perspective on tests and that too at the right time. I had a issue to solve, or rather refactor a logic a little, but testing those changes was getting too tiring. I saw this and one thing stuck to me, is about tests. Testing would be the perfect thing to avoid debugging, it will not solve bugs, but it will avoid their creation in the first place. Valuable advice about everything, every minute or second of this video is pure gold.

Learnt

Filtering a data frame using bitwise operators. I wanted to filter a data frame elements with the condition, let’s a document data has entire page content, I only want the upper 10% and bottom 10%, I can do something like this using the bitwise operator
```
df[ 
    ((df.y2 > 0) & (df.y2 < 0.1*height))
    |
    ((df.y2 > 0.9*height) & (df.y2 < height))
]
```
Nice stuff.

Tech News

DeepSeek, I think you are not on earth if you have not heard it this week.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev .

That’s it from this 27th edition of my weekly learning, I hope you enjoyed it, and leave comments on what you think about some of my takes or any feedback.

Techstructive Weekly #26

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #26

This week was really fun and exciting, I am continuing with more productive weeks. I was able to fix a lot of things this week. I created three videos this week. Worked on the side project with 2 live streams. Was able to demonstrate to the team at my work about the AI Agents. It was a great week.

Next week I am planning to wrap up the series of CRUD Applications with Golang, Netlify cloud functions, and LibSQL by adding authentication and authorization.

Quote of the week

“One hears the roar of the lion after the hunt, not before it”
— Meet Gor 2025

I am keeping silent in this phase of my life, it is hard, but I haven’t quit, I am trying new things instead of crying, I am pushing through every sob, every hurdle, every pain that goes inside but comes out as a sweat. I am here to hunt, not to sit and wait for the prey to come to me.

This week I am keeping things short, but right now I am a little tired of doing too many things at my work as well as my personal life, hence expect some burst of articles in the next week.

Created

CRUD Application with Golang, Netlify Cloud Functions and Turso’s LibSQL Database:

I didn’t create any videos the last week, however, this week, I was prepared and based on the things I created the last week, I combined together to make this video into 3 parts. More 2 parts will be coming in the next week.

Read

How HTTPS Works Comic:
This was a fun way to learn HTTP. It feels nice to read through the comic, nice visuals and extremely.
Doing hard things while living life - why we build vade studio in clojure
Functional programming language might be something I would try out this year. I tried to do it some previous year, but life got me in the middle and had to get back to things. I want to learn a new language this year for sure.

Watched

The PrimeAgen and Teej Devries with Mitchel Hshimoto (creator of Terraaform, Vagrant, Ghostty terminal, etc)
- This was a great video, all nerds talking about Golang and Rust and Zig.
- AI course, no one seems to be really against AI, its just not there yet, where one can just sit back and enjoy the view (or cry)
- Deciding the programming language or tools first and then the project, is a bit wired, but I think it really depends on what type of mindset are we coming while building the project.

Learnt

Python is a mess
- If I have a dictionary let’s say with some fields and one of the fields has value as None, now if try to access it it will give me none, I want to set the default value as something but it already has the value. This just makes me frustrate at points where it just doesn't;t make sense, the key is there but of null value, what is the purpose.
Mongo DB > using find, find_one, regex, in operator and various queries.
Golang > Iterators with slice range over.

Tech News

Open AI launches operators: This is a launch of Kill One More SaaS. Not sure how many SaaS will freak out tomorrow. But it is game-changing and somewhat to keep an eye on and not let it slip through our lives, as this phase is revolutionary for sure.
DeepSeek R1 models: Open Source and Cheaper Open AI’s alternative. This is a race of getting models to beat each other by accuracy or pricing by slight changes or improvements.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev .

That’s it from this 26th edition of my weekly learning, I hope you enjoyed it, and leave comments on what you think about some of my takes or any feedback

Techstructive Weekly #25

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #25

It was an exciting week, I did complete a lot of things on my work side, I had a bit of change in the routine of my work, an hour early, which makes me really productive and gets a lot of things done quite early and more importantly, I am now able to dedicate myself more time to learning new things.

This week, I didn’t release any videos, I was a bit exhausted and wanted to slow down a little, but I was not sitting idle, I was evaluating a project idea for some future videos, and the project is ready. Next week, expect some high-quality and in-depth videos.

Also, this week I learnt a ton of things about AI Agents and Workflows. I even created a proof of concept for creating agents using Langraph. I might create tutorials or guides on this soon.

Quote of the week

“The capacity to learn is a gift,
The ability to learn is a skill,
The willingness to learn is a choice.”
— Brian Herbert

Observe, Understand, Adapt, and Learn are quite the pillars to grow and become a better developer. As a software engineer or developers, we have to adapt to new changes just like these, for working with LLMs, AI Agents, and all the cutting-edge things happening, if this doesn’t excite you, I don’t what will, something should at least to continue in the long run.

Read

Golang 1.24 Interactive Guide
This was really well explained. Every change was accompanied by an interactive example that made it really a breeze to understand the concept and change being added to the language. Highly recommend checking it out.
Hot Take: TILs are junk food
I don’t agree with this, but some extent this post is true. I don’t read tils, I only come upon TILs from the feed that are relevant to me, so I only follow people whom I share the same interests and tools being used. There is value in reading someone's else perspective about using and discovering the tools or any thing common.

How HTTP/2 Works and How to Enable It in Go
This is also another post that I took the time to read and was worth it. I honestly don’t know how HTTP 2 works. To some extent, I know how HTTP 1 works, but if someone went a bit deeper, I would start breaking sweat. I really need to implement HTTP from scratch to understand the network stack—one day or day one.
- OH, the article, yes it talked in detail about what is the problem with HTTP 1 and how HTTP somewhat solves it.
- It is about breaking down the data into frames and makes sure the client has received the frame even if the previous frame is delayed. The fastest frame is served so, it doesn’t block the latest requests.

Wrote

Golang Web: PATCH Method (37th post in 100 days of Golang Series)
I wrote a 3k-word article, it was fun, and it was so rewarding. I learned a lot about different types of PATCH requests, the MERGE PATCH Request, the JSON PATCH Request, and the normal PATCH which is kind of misplaced everywhere.
- Merge PATCH is quite the essence of the PATCH Request, we only send the field / updated field in the request and we expect the server will update those fields only.
- JSON PATCH is the more complicated or I should say more fine tuned request. If the API or the resources are JSON based, this type of PATCH Reuqest is quite suitable and recommended.
Golang Web: DELETE Method (38th post in 100 days of Golang Series)
This felt quite short, after writing the mammoth article on PATCH. It was simple yet I wanted to complete the whole HTTP Method Suite. Now the next article will be diving deeper into the HTTP Clients and creating APIs.
A simple CRUD Application with Golang and Netlify Cloud Functions with Turso’s LibSQL Database

Watched

Picking a language in 2025
- I have still not completed watching this video, but till this point, all the things mentioned are so relatable.
  - C++ Standaard library: I learned the very basics of C++ in my first few years of the self-taught developer route, however, I never found it intuitive to use the standard library. Now I realize the beauty of Golang and Python. Just simple yet powerful to do almost anything.
  - Learning a language is quite simple, but mastering and getting proficient at it takes years. I can relate to Golang and Python, as I am still struggling to date.

AI Risjs No one is Talking About

Seeking the truth, the thing that AIs won’t ever have, the thing that makes human a human
— Teej Devries 2025

This was such a great short talk that covered a lot of questions and the right things to consider while adapting to LLMs. They are good, but still far from taking over, why on earth people want LLMs to take over int he first place?

The worst thing you can do for your career is to quit now:
Yes, that’s the worst part
But the best thing you can do is to just give your best, not even the best, be a little curious, have the grit to seek the truth, (troll devin sometimes)
And expect it to work out, if that doesn’t, then the last choice would be to quit eventually, but not without a fight, not just yet.

Learnt

Creating AI Agents with Langraph
- I have been learning about creating Agentic workflows. This week, I spent much time understanding the various components, such as the router, orchestrator, tools, and conditional edges.
- I want to summarise what I learned in a few sentences:
  - The agent is someone who takes action on certain inputs by acting on the environment. In the case of AI Agents, the LLMs will be given some text (any data) and they will be provided some environment to act on.
  - Tools are the sets of actions that the Agent can take this case, LLMs can interact with data by ng APIs, custom code, another call, etc.
  - Router / Orchestrator / Oracle is the decision maker, the central unit deciding what to do when.
- I might create a series around this sometime soon, I am currently overwhelmed by learning so many things and need to absorb them by writing more.

Using diff for two strings in Linux

diff <(<<<"123") <(<<<"1234")

Output:

1c1
< 123
---
> 1234

Python Count number of occurrences of a particular element in a list

Some subtle thing but really a handy way to count the occurrence of the element in a list.

>> s = [True, False, False, True, False]
>> s.count(True)
# 2
>> s.count(False)
# 3

>> nums = [1,1,2,3,4,4,4,5,5,5,5]
>> nums.count(2)
# 1
>> nums.count(4)
# 3

Tech News

AI will start automating the work of midlevel soydevs according to Mark Zuckerberg
- Come on, really Devin will replace me? I might have fun with that though, good luck to the employers fixing and debugging bugs in the prod!
Microsoft trying to form an AI focused on developers
- This is unexpected, Microsoft might have very rarely cared about developers. Is this in a bad way? Like Copilot for developers, or a snatch away the code with spies?

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev .

That’s it from this 25th edition of my weekly learning, I hope you enjoyed it, and leave comments on what you think about some of my takes or any feedback

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #24

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #24

It was an exciting week. I was pretty excited from the end of the past week with a new beginning to my work-life goal. After completing one, I have a new challenge in front of me: diving into the world of cutting-edge LLMs, agents, and Workflow. This can’t be more exciting.

This week, I was researching and exploring the frameworks, libraries and tools to create Agentic Workflows with LLMs, I can’t share much, but I see myself creating content around the things I will learn at my work/day job.

Apart from the hustle, I streamed again keeping the 2-month streak, moreover, I am excited and have new ideas popping out frequently. I have also been writing a script for a project-based tutorial video, which was the stuff I wanted to create when I was learning to code myself. I will try to complete the video this weekend, it would be a long one, but I would be delighted to create it.

Quote of the week

“The future is not something we wait for, it's something we create."
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I can’t wait for next week to roll in through the implementation, some proof of concepts, some demonstrations, and some planning, this is the future I am creating. I take the ownership and I build it, and not wait, sit and watch it unfold. I create my future, I am responsible for the misery or the pride I will have at the end.

Read

Simon Wilson Predictions for AI/LLMS for 1/3/6 years: That sounds a bit scary to be honest, but exciting as well. It would be more of the adoption rather than autonomy of the LLMs that in the coming years will dictate the direction.
Living the future by the numbers: It sounds like enormous growth, the cost is a different thing as mentioned in the post, but yes, the performance is the order of magnitude higher which makes a point for the progress humans have made in computing.
Human writing in the age of AI: This is a truthful article, we are growing ourselves in the photocopies of photocopies (using ai to summarise content written by ai). At some point, there will come a time, when humans will need human content and that’s when there will be a search for a gold rush, the authentic content rush. It’s time now, to make hay while the sun shines, it might be the last time when humans are valued before they are not and again they are. Be in the dark standing to help others when the darkness seems to take over.
Building Effective Agents (Anthropic Blog): This is a great overview of LLM Agents, different types of Agents and how is the landscape of AI Agents is changing due to LLM. It’s not changing technically, but how simple concepts from AI are striking again like a revival. I remember learning about it in my bachelor’s degree classes, agents as some program that acts according to the conditions and interaction with the environment, I can relate it so well and sticks to me due to that.
FastAPI Documentation: Concurrency and Async/Await: This was clear and the example provided are indeed helpful and relatable. I read this to understand the architecture these frameworks for creating agentic workflows are using. I had a confusion about async and asyncio, so just read this and got absolutely cleared.

Wrote

Code for dummy json patch API: This is a dummy, a demonstration-only API, will add a documentation page and more to it as I write the Golang HTTP PATCH method article. Hosted on netlify, took some time to understand the patch request and constructed the json-patch endpoint, will also add in a json merge patch endpoint.

Watched

Dennis Ivy: Building with Django and HTMX
I have not touched Django and HTMX as well for quite some months (maybe a year). I need to get back and create some quick projects for the community. I want to keep the guides and tutorials on Django from my article series more versatile and expansive. Talking about the stream, it was a great stream, loved that Dennis is back, learned a lot of stuff with htmx. A lot to learn when done yourself.

Distributed and Async task Queues with Python and celery Pycon US 2024:
This was an in-depth guide to celery, I learned a lot of stuff, celery might confuse you if you have not paid close attention to the details while implementing the queues. I forgot what celery was doing internally, I had used it, and built background workers while I was an intern @ Arka 360 (The Solar Labs). I learned a ton of celery and Django, but it was 2 years back, forgot a few things, and after watching this it clicked everything and now makes sense.

Learnt

I learned a lot of things about the JSON PATCH method, I will be writing a detailed post about using JSON Patch in the article 100 days of Golang: HTTP PATCH Method, which should be live after this newsletter.
- The HTTP PATCH method is like a PUT request but for updating only specific fields and not the entire resource in that sense, you only send the fields to be updated compared to the PUT request where you have to send the entire resource (including the ones that you don’t want to update).
- JSON PATCH is a specific type of PATCH method, where the payload is a JSON patch document, which includes
  - The operation to be performed
  - The field (path) to be updated
  - The value of the field/path to update to
- JSON Merge PATCH is another type of PATCH method where the payload is a JSON body with the fields and values you want to update (like put but only the fields to update)
Replace github with gitingest for getting a single string value for all the file contents, useful for LLM prompting.
Slash pages for specific sections on the blog like
- /now
- /colophon
- /links, etc

I am about to create a thoughts/link blog page for my site. Moving my site out of an SSG is the new year norm I believe, I moved my site from Jekyll to Markata 2 years ago, and now it seems the correct time. I don’t have any problems with Markata, I just want to use Golang for all the things I make, it feels good (not biased).

Tech News

Appwrite Compute Capabilities for Appwrite Functions: Appwrite keeps pushing the bar for what is called an open source backend as a service.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev .

That’s it from this 24th edition of my weekly learning, hope you enjoyed it, and leave comments on what you think about some of my takes or any feedback.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #23

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 00:00:00 UTC

We are in 2025! Happy New Year

It feels good to carry this newsletter through the year from July 2024 to January 2025 and counting ….

Week #23

It was a huge roaring start to the year, I created a video on the 1st, and that too a big video, I put in everything I could know about the thing I wanted to talk about in little as I could, and it's gaining views and is likely to spike as the Golang 1.24 release date approaches. 200 IQ move there.

I also had a few moments of enjoyment and satisfaction with my work, I was delivering the metrics report for the quarter and felt really good about the things I have done, still not good but way better than where it was.

I spent my Saturday and Sunday on live stream and understanding the weak package and weak pointers. I again spent half of the 1st of January on preparing the material for it and finally released the video with a sense of accomplishment. Couldn’t have asked for a better start to the year.

Quote of the week

“Learning and failures will always remain,
Guiding you through both joy and pain”
— Meet Rajesh Gor

This week, I failed and tried again. I failed again, but I kept trying and finally, I understood the weak package. It’s a reminder that this principle holds true in life as well.

At times, I might have been in the wrong mindset while learning, but I ended up discovering more than I expected. The satisfaction I feel now is beyond words.

Learning stays with you for a lifetime, shaping who you are. Failures, on the other hand, often come with taunts and criticism when things aren't going your way. But in those moments, it’s crucial to let your learning guide you to turn those failures into stepping stones for growth.

Created

What’s new in Golang 1.24: Weak Package
An introduction to the weak package in the standard library, I explored the difference between strong and weak references and some garbage collector-related quirks in Golang. The usage of weak pointers and some examples in different cases.
2024 Tech Retrospective/Review Article:
This has been my ritual since 2022, I love reflecting on my successes, failures, and just things that I did in the past year. It helps me realize how far I have come and motivates me to keep going ahead. About the actual review, 2024 was a bittersweet year for me, the first half kept me dangling by the thread but the latter half made me fly in the sky. This was my lesson that when no one believes in you, you still have to belive in yourself, you have to have hope, you need to have the courage to keep going ahead and not care too much about the result. Hope you read and enjoy my rambling :)
Live streamed about Static site generator and making plugin-based system in Golang.
Saturday’s Stream
Sunday’s Stream

I took a break from Advent of Code problems, it was getting a bit tough to manage time and resist completing this project, so I abandoned this Aoc 2024 for the moment and picked up this project back. I converted the basic SSG into a pluggable component-based SSG. This weekend I will be completing the Database integration part.

Read

Are Pointers faster than Values:
Hell no, that is not faster, it is just that stack is faster in that case, but the moment you make you point the gun to yourself, you will shoot on the foot.
Docker Networking Basics:
Learning about docker is never enough, I learned about the -P which will forward all ports from the container to the host machine at random. That is wired but a good quirk to know, you never know when that might be handy.
Peoples 2024 review posts
- Aron Francis’ 2024 year in review
  This is the man I admire, and wow he has done quite a bit to make quite an impact on developers, the courses are soo valuable, the articles are soo motivating, as humble as he gets.
- Haimantika Mitras: Wrapping up 2024
  It’s a bit hard to face situations like hers in the festive month. It feels a bit disturbing and yet she came out with flying colors and kept the enthusiasm on, a lot of inspiration to draw from.
- Florencia Luz Duarte’s: Goodbye 2024
  THe story felt a bit similar to mine, landing a full-time job after a hunt. It feels good to be in those shoes. It might be hard, but I am emphatic about it, as I know the feelings of rejection after you worked hard. Also the nice little tidbits like having 24 hours in a day, we can do only a few things, needn’t do all the things is a reminder to ease out and take things one by one.

Watched

Don’t serve static files from your backend serve, use serverless storage cloud providers
It’s time for a change for The Primeagen
He quit Netflix and now feels a bit of change in his routine. It is a heck of a commitment to stream for 6 years almost every single day. That is enthusiasm, that is contagious curiosity. I have a huge respect for him.

Learnt

Understood a lot about Weak pointers and Garbage collection in Golang
- Weak pointers allow to observe a value/object without stopping the garbage collector from collecting or cleaning up that object.
- The garbage collector has a graph like structure that keeps track of the states of the variables in the programs in the mark phase, in order to observe and clean them in the sweep phase.
- Weak pointers use unique pointers which are the direct references to all the objects used in the program. The weak pointer internally points to this unique pointer which in turn points to the actual object, so when the garbage collector sees that the actual object has no direct reference it cleans that memory where the object is stored making the unique pointer nil. So, when the weak pointer is accessed to check the value, it will be nil in a safe way.
How to send messages on a slack channel with the webhooks
This was one thing I studied for implementing or updating a few things at my work. I was excited to get the data out and by doing this I was satisfied by looking at my work, the metrics shine in the alerts channel.

Tech News

70% of go developers (who filled the survey) use LLM while developing with Go
That is an insane number, are you saying to me every 7 people out of 10 use LLM while working with Go? That is understandable considering how repeatable Golang gets sometimes, but the adoption rate is bonkers.

Not much news, I mean who will release a product on 31st December, developers are partying, right?

Yes, they party a lot!

Anyways:)

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev .

That’s it from this 23rd edition of my weekly learning, hope you enjoyed it, and leave comments on what you think about some of my takes or any feedback.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #22

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 00:00:00 UTC

This is the last edition for 2024; the next edition will be on 3rd January 2025.

This week again was a bit slow or not much happened. I recorded 2 videos and did a live stream to solve some pending problems and that was it. At work, I completed the thing that I was supposed to do this quarter and I couldn’t be happier, definitely, there are things to improve on, but I like where I stand.

The Sunday was extremely lazy for me, didn’t do anything. Was a bit tired and just read and completed a book that I have been reading “The Graveyard Book” by Neil Gaiman. It was a good one, I really loved the way the author brought the dead people to life and the most enjoyable part was the sense of humor in this.

I have a pretty long list of things to be done for the last week of 2024, let’s see how many I am able to wrap up before the world ends. One thing that will definitely come is the 2024 Developer Retro, a developer retrospective that I have been doing for the past 2 years and will stick to this year as well. So keep an eye out on the 31st for the post to go live. I will be reading other’s retrospectives as well.

Quote of the week

"The most effective way to do it, is to do it."
— Amelia Earhart

The most effective way to record video is to just hit that record button, just do it. That’s what has been for me in this week, to keep going in the low times and just keep on creating videos, writing articles, creating projects, even if no one notices it, I am the one benefiting from it, no one else necessarily needs to, I am more than happy if someone finds it helpful.

Created

Advent of Code 2024 in Golang, Day 4
This was recorded on a Saturday night, so I was just crunching out the advent of code problems on live streams and then took an hour break and back to video recording and completed this video.

Advent of Code 2024 in Golang, Day 5
This was a breeze, I recorded the video inside an hour with the flow. I just hit record and completed the voice-over along with the explanation on the go, which boosted my confidence to a new level while creating videos. I didn’t know when time flew by when I completed recording the first part and the video was 33 minutes long! Phew that was a good video, my longest video so far.

Read

Karan from Zerodha on Open Source tools and Observability
This was a good post, I learned a lot of things from this about how the giant trading app Zerodha has a few engineers and how they are managing the engineering and infrastructure. Also, the love for open source and appreciation of the tools that they use from the CTO is a sign of a healthy developer relationship.

SRE Stories

Karan from Zerodha on Open-Source Tools and Observability

Karan - a Software Developer specializing in Infrastructure/Ops and Observability at Zerodha talks about his SRE journey which comes from years of hands-on experience and a practical mindset…

a year ago · 5 likes · Prathamesh Sonpatki

Cognitive load is what matters:
This is really a nice point, making good look smart is going to cost in longer run, keep it simple and avoid the perfect code trap is what I learned from this post. You might write a 200 IQ 3 lines of code, but someone else the future maintaining the code, might take 200 minutes to understand what the heck is the edge in that, which might make the cognitive load way to much than the actual business logic load.
Precomputation - James’ Coffee Blog
This is also an interesting observation made by the author, SSGs, Wikipedia, rely on this reverse index, i.e. mapping sites (HTML) to URLs that improve the response speed and load on the server, but it is not always a good idea to do that, there are uses of this in its own territory.

Watched

Are we Cooked with Open AI o3
This was a good take, I think we should not forget the fundamentals, as well as not lose track of what is happening in the world. But not to get too lost in them that we forget the main objective, to have fun and learn new things.

Why every developer should post on Youtube:
This is another good take, If you post something out to the public, you are not just ahead of others but also improving on your communication skills. I started posting on youtube just to improve my communication skills, and to overcome a creative slump that I had since I got converted to full-time at work. It’s nothing to do with work, but I just needed a attitude shift towards how I approach my goals moving ahead as a developer.

FreeCodeCamp Podcast/Interview with Dennis Ivy (host Quincy Larson)
Dennis is a humble and hard-working guy, he thaught me Django, and with that, I have started my career with a remote internship that might have landed me where I am today, truly grateful for him. About his journey as a person, it is really amazing, I ahven’t completed the full video, but till what I listened to, it was inspiring and relatable.

Learnt

Learning about PubNub in Python (Publisher Subscriber architecture) for Event-driven applications:
I wanted to fix a task at my work and that required me to learn about the specifics of how the application sends the message for certain event and the frontend responds to those events. It was a great little thing to learn by actually solving the bug.
Python’s dictonaries really give me troubles, I don’t know I am spoiled from Golang or from Python. But mutation of variables is just garbage compared to golang at least. I want to write a post about it clarifying how to carefully use copy, deepcopy and direct mutation in Python.

Tech News

Google using Anthropic Claude AI to train its own AI: This is gross, wild, I mean we all expected this to happen at some point, but from Google, really? Ai using AI to get more AI. Google has never been in the race to be honest in this AI hype (well now its over 2 years, we can stop calling it hype, AI ERA). Bard couldn’t keep up with GPT 3.5 and hence they renamed to Gemini and still gemini is not comparable to OpenAI or Claude. Makes sense they are using Claude to train the new model (what will be its name, -2 steps from GPT :)
OpenAI’s o3 model is scaling but with cost (maybe not with performance XD): This is a huge cost, just compare it with the normal 4o or Haiku, it is a gazillion times much better.
Ghostty Terminal Released: This is something to try out on the next weekend. This is the terminal emulator created by the author of Terraform, Vault, Nomad, Vagrant, etc. and he has co-founded Hashicorp, so something serious cooking here.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev . Sadly the Hackernews newsletter edition #727 has not yet dropped in, maybe its the holiday season so a off week for them.

That’s it from this 22 edition of my weekly learning, hope you enjoyed it, and leave comments on what you think about some of my takes or any feedback.

Leave a comment

Thank you for Reading.

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #21

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Week #21

It was a nice week. I explored OpenAI stuff, fixed some issues in nested code structure, remade some Hugo sites, and did a bit of reading.

There were a lot of debugging sessions. I wanted to solve the advent of code but struggled for 10 days. Yes, and I have been struggling for 15 days at the blog event. I am still hoping to clear a few problems over the weekend. I am also looking to write some articles over the weekend. The weekend seems like a bit of high hope, but let’s see how much I can pull off. I also need to implement a quick project for my blog writing.

Quote of the week

"It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop."
– Confucius

This is me speaking, to say that I am slow at solving the advent of code, but still haven’t quit yet. I will be there slowly. I won’t stop, this weekend I will try to get through some backlogs.

Created

Day 3 of Advent of Code 2024 in Golang
This was the do and don’t multiply expression problem. It was a good problem, and I solved it with a different approach of using enabled and disabled portions of strings to strip off the disabled strings and then use the part one logic for the actual answer.

Read

The Curse of Markdown
It was a nice article, I agree that a few blogs are lying between markdown and rich content. I also love to express ideas that markdown might limit.
The Golang 1.24 release is looking seriously awesome
I don’t think this is a big release, yes there are a few cool little things that are added up in the standard library. But nothing groundbreaking as the 1.23 and 1.21 releases.
Surely not all codes’s worth it
This is to the point, I would like to write the code that matters and leave the rest to LLM to generate because it’s not worth the time for me to write everything. I still want to write the stuff that might be oblivious because I have not written it yet in my life, I would like to fail and still try again.
Register Spill
Surely not all code's worth it
Listen to this: “I don’t use AI for programming, because I want to learn and get better at programming and if I have an LLM generate code for me, I’m not learning anything…
Read more
a year ago · 29 likes · 10 comments · Thorsten Ball
The premise trap: DHH:

This is relatable, I can’t actually comment here, I am a junior but yes working with a AI chatbot/assistant is frustrating as hell sometimes, sometimes it is refreshing. I believe it will be a skill to work with LLMs in few years. I admire Simon Wilson for this, he just tries wild things to make it work for him.

Year in Review: Dev Agarwal:

This was a heart-touching review, I can relate to it, you will have everything before there will be nothing. This is the cycle, life is a miss and a bliss. There will be times you jump ahead in the day, but there will be times when you will struggle to wake up, even fear to live, but it is the one who goes through it and still does it anyway.

Shilin's Second Year without a job:
This was a surprising read, I can’t believe that it is possible to live life without having a consistent stream of income. I just feel it is not for me and my lifestyle, I can’t live like that.

Watched

Golang | Remix | Pocketbase in a single binary
THis is fascinating, it will make things so simple, just like the philosophy of Go. Make and Keep it simple, whom are you trying to complicate for? yourself in few months, years?

Learnt

About batch calls in OpenAI

This is good only for some specific tasks, it could be useful for scrapping and getting certain things for the day. It has 24 hours of turnaround time, which means it could return anywhere between 1 second to 24 hours, it will respond late obliviously, essentially it will wait for less peak hours and traffic time to respond to the request.

Using tiktoken to count the number of Tokens
I learned this to calculate the number of tokens in a particular set of requirements, which is basically some sort of cost analysis.

Tech News

Open AI launches o3 models: Another day, another model
GitHub Launches Copilot with free access: Nothing major, codeium is already free and good enough

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev

Techstructive Weekly #20

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Week #20

This week was a slow-moving week, it was a time when we see winters in Mumbai, just for a couple of days and that made me too lazy to wake up early which in turn ruined the entire day. It was that type of week, but good progress.

I wrote a few articles following the advent of code for days 1,2,3,4 and 5, and a couple are in progress.

Solved the problems for day 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 on live stream.

Implemented a few things and debugged for issues in the existing code, that’s how the usual chore at work, felt good at the end of the week for refreshed implementation and metrics evaluation.

So in a weekly recap:

3 Streams (2 hours+ each)
1 video
5 Articles on approaches for solving AoC problems and implementation in Golang

Quote of the Week

"Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going."
— Jim Ryun

Motivation is what gave me the itch to right this newsletter, bu hang on it doesn’t last for a week or two, it is my grit and habit that made me do it till week 20th starting from week 0th.
I started this newsletter to get me out of the writing slump I have been in for quite some months, I have soo many ideas and am not able to find the mindset to write them down. This newsletter has given me the push, the habit of writing and staying to my commitment of writing everything I did in a week and I want to continue as long as I can. It is a habit now for me.

Created

Advent of Code, 2024 in Golang: Day 2 Ordering Pages:
This was my first time recording the video and realizing that a 40-minute raw screencast has no audio, dang! That made me waste 2 hours re-recording the audio to match the video part and trimming it, might have made 2 videos on the weekend, but was able to squeeze in a video a week.
Advent of Code, 2024 in Golang Blogvent series:
- Day 1: https://www.meetgor.com/aoc-2024-day-1/
- Day 2: https://www.meetgor.com/aoc-2024-day-2/
- Day 3: https://www.meetgor.com/aoc-2024-day-3/
- Day 4: https://www.meetgor.com/aoc-2024-day-4/
- Day 5: https://www.meetgor.com/aoc-2024-day-5/
Live streaming day 4 to 8 in Golang
- Day 3 | 4:

Day 7 and 5:

Day 8:

Connect with me on Youtube or on Twitch for live stream solving Advent of Code in Golang problems days 9 till 14 this weekend.

Read

Introducing Limbo: A complete rewrite of SQLite in Rust
This is pretty cool, I was thinking it might be already there, yes definitely, but they are just not re-writing it, they are forking and adding features on top of it which is absolutely wild. Surely there won’t be time gains, but they now have a lot more control over what needs to be changed and included while adding more or even upstreaming from SQLite-core. People might call re-writing a waste of time (especially for such a well-developed and stable tool), but people forget they are making something from scratch gives you a whole different depth of understanding than just forking it. It will pay dividends slowly in the long run, pulling from upstream might be challenging and tedious but since SQLite is rock-solid, there won’t be any breaking changes that might get added to it, so a win-win for Turso in my opinion.
Interview gone wrong: Python tidbit
This was just a small tidbit that the author is trying to make here and I kind of agree, python has syntax sugar and gets too abstracted while doing some dangerous pointer things.
A Revolution in how robots learn (40-minute read)
I read it on a Sunday morning and I was just in awe with the writing and the flow of one example to other. The way the author describes every act of robots learning with the example of his kids is really touching and makes it so human. Worth my time.
Writing as a software engineer:

The Polymathic Engineer

Writing as as software engineer

Hi Friends…

a year ago · 31 likes · 5 comments · Franco Fernando

This was one of the articles, that reminded me that the only thing that can improve the craft is by doing it. By producing more, you make mistakes, you know what it is to fail, you then re-approach the problem with different tactic and learn and iterate. No writer is perfect, all are in some range of perfect, it’s just that I am just starting and there are a ton of things to learn and improve on, but they won’t come off thin air, I have to put in the work and produce stuff for it to happen.
Advent of Code day 8 after implementing myself, I decided to take a look at others’ solutions:
https://www.bytesizego.com/blog/aoc-day8-golang
This was an easy problem from the implementation perspective I did it in a few minutes, to be honest, but understanding it was tough, so I left the explaining to others. This post shows courage and willingness to go in the wild, show your approach and do it skillfully, truly an inspiration to write and complete Blogvent (I am running a week behind already :))
Noticing the nice things:
This was such a nice post, having kids around is nice. I might be too early to say this, but I find it wholesome and cute. Also, she is is running blogvent, cheer her up for maintaining 12 day streak, 13 more to go!

Watched

The Primeagen and Teej Devries interview with Ginger Bill, the creator of Odin language, with some hot-takes and opinions about his philosophy of software development, Language Server Protocols and auto-completions, Package managers, simplicity, and more of his experiences.

Neovim made me a better software developer
This is a great talk by a Neovim contributor and documentation reader TJ,, if you use Neovim/Vim and don’t know TJ, shame on you! He explains what are the factors that contribute to a better software developer, all the points are so well thought out and backed up by facts. So, highly recommend checking that out.

Advent of Code: Behind the Scenes by creator Eric Wastl
Solving a problem for Advent of Code won’t be the same anymore after watching this video, the amount of work someone has to do and that appreciation is now ebbed into my mind while reading any problem in AoC. This talk shows how low were his expectations when he initially launched AoC in 2025, from 70 users to millions of users, which is such a great achievement for a side project. Just hard work and the result of that.

Learnt

Swizzling operation on arrays
Here’s something I read from Thorsten Ball’s tweet or post on Bluesky:
```
TIL Odin supports swizzling, a concept I only learned this year about when writing shaders for the first time in my life

https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/
```
I got interested in the way it was documented, so I decided to take a look and went on a rabbit hole of searching for what it meant, I knew from the examples what it was but still wanted to understand from the developer’s perspective why and where It could be used.
Here is what I read about it more, there is no beginner-level or nice explanation of swizzling for programmers. I will surely write about it.
It’s basically like a shortcut hack for working with arrays or we can denote them as a matrix to perform operations on them efficiently.
Memoization for caching problems where things are too repetitive
While solving the advent of code problem day 11, this concept could be handy as it helps to store the already computed values in a map or a cache or data store, whatever you wanna call it at your scale. However, the essence is to store the computed value for the later stage, where there are clear-cut rules or defined behavior of the computation required to do certain things.
In the context of this problem, we have to check how many stones will be there at the end of 25 blinks, basically at each blink, there are certain rules like if there is a stone numbered 0, it changes to 1, there is one more rule and you can check the whole question here. It can be solved using a map where we know a stone number can be split into n number of stones, so we use that when we encounter that number in the future and don’t re-compute it again.
Use structs instead of a list of integers for coordinates, please
I am solving advent of code problems in golang, and gosh I have wasted so much time using a slice of integers instead of creating structs, the code shouts to use it, but reluctant elitist me refrained from doing it and went with the flow and ended up messing up gazillions of time index of x with y and yes it was a skill issue.
I WILL USE THE STRUCT type point struct {x int; y int} INSTEAD OF THIS DAMN THING []int{} .
df to_json is a handy way to dump a data frame when looking for something very minute or finding some pattern
I discovered that df.to_json is a function available to dump out a data frame to a JSON file which is quite nice and handy. I did use it to export a data frame in a notebook to a file while I was debugging a few things, and this function came in like a savior in the sea of lots of data.
Learnt and Learned are both valid achsually
I use the title of this section as LEARNT but LEARNED is fine as well, and Grammarly makes both incorrect, he wants it to be Learn it is done, I have learned it this week, I am not learning it now, so please stop yelling at me about that. Then in their article, they say both are valid, what a sweet cohesion!

Tech News

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week.

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #19

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Week #19

It was a pretty good week, with 2 videos published, 1 short created, and 4 live streams done, and 3 days of AOC solved. Phew!

On Saturday last week, I experimented with Netlify cloud functions in Golang and also for Turso’s LibSQL Database, and that went pretty well. Then started a livestream for the SSG in Golang, and completed the feed loading. Then on Sunday it was AOC Day 1, where I live-streamed it, created the video, and also scheduled the Netlify cloud functions video for Monday.

Then came Monday, derailed for a while but back to business on Tuesday somewhat. The week kept going and I kept solving problems for AoC in Golang and it gave me confidence to improve my problem-solving skills.

Pretty good week and I hope to make it even better next week.

Quote of the week

"Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better."
— Maya Angelou

I have been creating videos almost consistently for the past 3 months and I have created 9 videos. I didn’t knew anything about video editing, I was slow at first, but I did the best I could. Now I know some tricks to get the editing done faster I do that to produce more videos and do it quickly. Start → Learn → Improve → Repeat.

Created

Create and Deploy Netlify Serverless Functions in Golang
On the weekend, I experimented with how to deploy a Golang serverless function for the LibSQL database, and through that, I got to understand the cloud function deployment on Netlify with Golang. So, created a video for that on Sunday and published it on Monday.
Live streaming Advent of Code 2024 in Golang → day1 | day 2 | day 3
After completing the basic SSG with Golang, on Sunday I live-streamed solving the day 1 puzzle for Advent of Code 2024 in Golang.
Advent of Code Day 1 in Golang video
After solving the problem for day 1 on live stream, created a short video explaining the problem and solution.

Read

AOC in Golang Day 1: Missing ABS() for Integers
This was a really well-researched and interesting article about why there is no Absolute function for integers. It makes sense now, but I still feel it could handle the general use cases so it shouldn’t be an issue. But yes there is a genuine reason for that to not exist in the standard library.
Command line tools I Like: rwblickhan.org
This was a nice post on the aggregated tools that the author uses most of the time and are quite handy. I also use most of the tools everyday and would like to create a dev container for the setup of my preferred editor/tools and shells and plugins and all that good stuff.
How I stopped worrying and learned to love Go Interfaces
This was well explained and to the point of why interfaces are confusing for most of the developers. They are really handy while working with APIs and I agree sometimes it could be annoying to fit the problems using interfaces, I have come to realize it is not that interfaces are bad, it’s just that we are not clear with the solution to the structure of the program that we are constructing.
The tech Utopia fantasy is over
I haven’t completed reading this post, but till what i have read it feels like we are moving away from the natural and individuality and focusing on the profits and metric games.
Avoid overusing the go init function
It is true, that we overuse certain things like this adding logic in the init functions that makes it hard to test and reproduce the behavior that is expected for a library or a package.

Watched

Advent of Neovim
This is a good video explaining why he uses Neovim and how installing a program from a source helps you to appreciate and understand the project more.
There is also a hidden gem for setting up an appname to a different name to isolate the versions or flavors of Neovim.

Configure Neovim’s options
This was another gem by Teej Devries for setting language/file type-specific configurations or options in Neovim.

Aaron Francis on The Software Huddle
He is a all round good guy. This podcast is really inspiring to learn and be consistent at it, he has gone from Accountant to launching his own company as a developer, speaker, educator, and database master.

Learnt

You can swap variables in Golang just like in Python

a := 5
b := 10
a, b = b, a

This is pretty handy, I encountered this while trying to solve the advent of code problems. I thought can we do this in Golang as I have lazy habits from Python?

Slices.Delete in Golang is Wired
I mean just look at this

s := []int{1,2,3}
slices.Delete(s, 1, 2)
fmt.Println(s)
// [1, 3, 3]

s = []int{1,2,3}
s = slices.Delete(s, 1, 2)
fmt.Println(s)
// [1,3]

I mean, If the function is returning the modified slice, why are we mutating the original one? Do one or the other, not both.

The safer route will be like this then:

s = []int{1,2,3}
newS := slices.Delete(slices.Clone(s), 1, 2)

fmt.Println(s)
// [1, 2, 3]

fmt.Println(newS)
// [1,3]

I need to dive deep into why this is the way it is. Looks pretty confusing to mean.
AFTER A WHILE:

This article explains a bit clearly why the original slice is useless after the operation and we need to pass a copy of that in order to avoid it’s mutation.

Tech News

Amazon’s New LLM Models are the cheapest among the available ones
Open AI launches ChatGPT pro for $200 per month
Bluesky keeps growing in numbers

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev

Leave a comment

I have been on bluesky as well, and I must say the engagement and the reach is much better compared to Twitter. I guess I’ll be posting more on Bluesky now.

You can connect with me on meetgor.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week.

Happy Coding :)

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #18

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Week #18

It was a great week, if I could call it a hard-working week, it would be appropriate. I started the week (the weekends) by streaming, creating a video, and planning a few more videos for the next week. Then starting the week with deep intense programming sessions, a couple of flow states during the week made the mind feel accomplished and excited.

After releasing the code that I had been working on for so long in the past week, this week was about taking a new approach to the initial implementation, and it was smooth, it felt good, I was able to change the code that I had written faster and iterate on it quickly. This gave me the confidence that I can write production-ready and readable code. I am not that bad, there is a lot to improve on but quite a good feeling to live with and continue the work.

Quote of the week

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do”
— Steve Jobs

This week, I did the things that I loved, working with SSGs, and databases, writing code, and teaching what I know. It might not be great, but these are the things that I love, and other is no one forcing me to do this, this comes out of my will.

Created

VIDEO: What’s new in Golang 1.24: Omitzero Tag in Marshalling JSON
This video was about the specific tag which is being added to the encoding/json package for Marshalling from Golang structs to JSON (serialization.)

TIL: Gotcha with Chained Assignment in Python
I learned this point while implementing a feature at work, I was in a deep flow state, but this thing bugged me and broke out of the state rightly so, otherwise would have gone in wired directions without doing anything significant.
Learning python might be simple, but mastering it is a task, there are soo many things to learn about and be aware about. Python is simple but at times could be dangerous if not careful.

Meet's Substack

TIL: Gotcha with Chained Assignment in Python

I was writing some Python code and wanted to initialize a few variables to an empty list. Instead of creating separate lists for each variable, I decided to use chained assignments like this…

a year ago · Meet

STREAM: SSG from Scratch in Golang (2 streams)
I streamed on the weekend and started where I left off by creating static site generator in Golang. This part was about loading the config and posts from the folders and files.
Then on Sunday, I continued the stream for completing the most basic SSG in golang by adding the rendering of the templates.
- Loading Config and Posts

- Loading and Rendering Templates

Read

Database Indexing Explained: from Computer Science Simplified Substack
This was a great post, explaining the necessary context and fundamentals required to understand the indexing. The last part was a bit heavy, but overall a good and in-depth article on learning indexing.
From laid off to hired: Software engineering guide
This is a good motivational post on getting hired in the era of 2024, this is a new kind of world where you are not only hired based on what you say, but also what your impact says, your brand, your online presence, and actual skills.
How I increased my visibility: Kent C. Dodds
To increase visibility, you need to put it out there. To be seen by others, you have to show your skills and struggles in public. This is to a point article showing practical experience in his journey.
Wafris: Rearchitecting Redis to SQLite
I watched a video on the Database School where a SaaS (Firewall for Web applications) provider moved from Redis to Sqlite. This is such a nice technical post, there are so many things to dive into and how SQLite is the database that just works and not just works but also shines.
Time spent programming is often time well spent
Programming is often more fun than the alternative uses of my time.
Programming is really fun, the joy of creating something and the satisfaction of completing or figuring out by yourself hits different and cannot be replaced with anything else.

Watched

Moving from Redis to SQLite with Mike Buckbee: Aron Francis in the Database School
As mentioned in the above post, this video was absolutely fun to watch, so much technical stuff in a digestible way. There is so much to learn about networking, the quirks of Redis, SQLite and its adaptability, IP Addresses, and interesting problems to solve. Totally worth the hour.
We built an orchestrator from scratch: Fly.io
Why Flyio built their orchestrator, kind of. They use VMs which Kubernetes is not ideal for as it is designed for orchestrating containers, Nomad has a quirk of assigning a minimal number of VMs/machines for the users, which is not secure enough for Fly.io, so reasonable enough that it is worth for them to write and Orchestrator from scratch (well not entirely from scratch)
Why would anyone use Functional programming: The Coding Gopher
Functional programming languages are designed to think about the what and not the how. So we just focus on the what things to implement and not care about how. So, there are things like functions, no variables no mutations (get out of here python).
Let’s Prototype a Javascript JIT Compiler: Andreas Kling
To be honest, I didn’t get most of the technical things, however, I get the point, he is using AI wisely, whenever he uses AI, HE IS IN CONTROL and he doesn’t let AI take over. I have not completed this video, I said last week it would be on my watched list, but I got lost in other stuff and lost interest in the livestream.

Learned

Difference between omit empty and omit zero while marshaling JSON bytes in Golang
From the documentation
The "omitempty" option specifies that the field should be omitted from the encoding if the field has an empty value, defined as false, 0, a nil pointer, a nil interface value, and any empty array, slice, map, or string.

The omit empty is wired, it has its definition of what is empty (which I don’t disagree with but it could be confusing at times). With omit zero, we can control what a zero value is for certain specific data types like structs and time values.
Will write a post on it soon.

How to render templates in Golang
While doing the live stream and building the static site generator from scratch, I explored the difference of Parse and ParseFS which are two different ways of rendering templates.

Template

// templates/hello.html

<h1>Hello, {{.Name}}</h1>

ParseFS

package main

import (
	"embed"
	"html/template"
	"log"
	"os"
)

// Embed the templates directory
//go:embed templates/*
var templatesFS embed.FS

func main() {
	
	tmpl, _ := template.ParseFS(templatesFS, "templates/hello.html")
	data := map[string]string{"Name": "Meetgor.com"}
	_ = tmpl.Execute(os.Stdout, data)
}

ParseFiles

package main

import (
	"html/template"
	"log"
	"os"
)

func main() {
	
	tmpl, _ := template.ParseFiles("templates/hello.html")
	data := map[string]string{"Name": "Meetgor.com"}
	_ = tmpl.Execute(os.Stdout, data)

}

ParseFiles reads templates from the file system, while ParseFS reading templates from an embedded file system.
ParseFiles requires physical files on disk, whereas ParseFS uses files embedded in the Go binary.
ParseFiles allows template modifications without recompiling, while ParseFS requiring recompiling to update templates.

Chained assignment references the same value to all the assigned variables in Python
Python might be easier to learn as said earlier, but mastering it really hard, I leart that chaining assignment is not ideal when you want to iniitialise individual variables to different values (same values but separate on their own moving ahead in the code)
```
a = b = c = [1,2,3]
b.append(4)

# a = [1,2,3.4]
# b = [1,2,3,4]
# c = [1,2,3,4]
```

Tech News

Alibaba Releases QwQ: An Open Source Model as Competitor to OpenAI’s O1 Reasoning Models
Every week, some random thing is happening in the world of AI, someone beats the other buzzing model by little margins. Exciting times in 2025.
Spotify cuts developer access to some developer recommendation APIs
This is bad, and looks like the possible issues moving ahead in this AI driven internet.
BlueSky Open API means anyone can scrape your data for AI training
Everything will have side effects, it depends on how the people are actually using it to their own and others’ advantage.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for daily developer articles, join daily.dev

Conclusion

This week was all about refinement and iteration, and it felt great to see the progress I made. From streaming and content creation to diving into deep coding challenges, I learned a lot about the intricacies of Golang and Python.

It is Advent of Code from next week, so I am planning to stream daily for solving AoC with Golang in the first iteration and OCAML in the second, let’s see how it goes.

If you want to tune in, slide into Twitch or youtube

https://www.twitch.tv/meet_gor

https://www.youtube.com/@meet-technically

That’s it from this week, hope you did well this week, and have a happy week and weekend ahead!

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week.

Happy Coding :)

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #17

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Week #17

What a week, had written code through all the days, thought a lot about solving certain issues, integrated reviewed changes, and also wrote and created a video on the weekend.

This was the week of releasing the thing that I have been building over the span of the past 2 months and really felt good this Thursday to release it. Tested it and worked perfectly, now on to a new set of experiments and building on top of the thing in the upcoming weeks or months even, exciting times ahead.

I completed a 50-day writing routine by publishing three article series: 9, 21, and 17 pieces each. Those are related to mythology (I am revealing it now) but not just yet, let it grow, and will post it here shortly. It felt really good, now thinking of expanding the writing routine to something else or more personal and making reach a wider audience after all I want to see myself as a writer.

Stats for the week

Release the code written and experimented over the past 2 months
Prototype for the new changes as an enhancement on top of the experiment
Fixed 3 bugs

Plans for the next week

Streaming for the SSG project
Create a video for the Golang omitzero tag in 1.24

Quote of the week

"It always seems impossible until it’s done."
— Nelson Mandela

While starting the quarter it seemed the task would be almost impossible or not expected to be going to release, but this week it was released. From experiment to release, it felt like a journey, I enjoyed it, initially, it was a hurdle, but after falling a couple of times, getting up, learning, and diving a little deep, helpful feedback from my mentors and friendly environment, I am here on the other side of the hurdle. It really feels impossible until it’s done, believe in yourself, because if you don’t no one will believe in you.

Created

Video: What’s new in Golang 1.24, SplitSeq and SplitAfterSeq:
Last weekend I dived into the golang 1.24, and set up the system to install the latest version of Go that later became a TIL by experimenting and exploring the new change, the video about Split and the new SplitSeq was created.
The basic difference is about how we store and iterate the splitter strings, the prior stores it as a slice, the other creates a specific type as an iterator to iterate it on the go.

Wrote: TIL: Build Golang from Source for v1.23+
My first post on the substack is an awkward TIL, I don’t care if it provides value or not, it is just a thing I learned myself while doing something. So, thought of sharing it here.
This was learned while creating the above-mentioned video, I wanted to explore the features coming to Go in 1.24 which is supposed to be released in February 2025. So, while installing I found a couple of ways to build golang from the source, with a bit of trial and error was able to get the simplest way I can think of here.
Meet's Substack
TIL: Build Golang from Source for v1.23+
Introduction…
Read more
a year ago · Meet

Read

They all use it, don’t they?
LLMs, Code Completions, and AI Assistants, all are just tools, they might not be fit for all the cases, but they should just be used for something specific. Also, I agree with Thorsten here, if you are not curious then you are falling in keeping up with tech. The curiosity, the spark, the excitement to learn the technology under the hood is really needed to sustain in tech.
Register Spill
They all use it
Last week, at a conference, I had a random hallway conversation with another engineer. We ended up talking about Zed and he told me he’ll try it, but does it have any AI features? If so, can you turn them off…
Read more
a year ago · 33 likes · 44 comments · Thorsten Ball
Lessons learned from 25 years of writing software:
There are so many valuable tips here,
- Master at least one programming language/database
- Use Linux
- Write simple and boring code
- Build trust
- Don’t be shy from using bare bones or simple tools
  And many more, really a good post to follow and become a better developer.

Playful Programming:
I want to watch that video, there is so much explained by Thorsten, should be worth watching then, he is a great deep-diving programmer, can’t ignore his recommendations. Just by reading at the explanations of his observations on the video, it seems there is a lot to learn. Next week will be in the watched section.
Register Spill
Playful Programming
Last weekend I watched this video of Andreas Kling prototyping a JIT compiler for his Ladybird browser…
Read more
2 years ago · 21 likes · 3 comments · Thorsten Ball
- How Raviraj Achar reads books with limited time:
  Time is really limited, like everything around you seems to drag into it, the phone most importantly, it feels like a reservoir of knowledge but not wisdom. Taking the time to read is a sign of a level of control over the mind and grit. The process by Raviraj seems a little too complicated or farfetched like Readwise and Notion, those add a lot of friction. I don’t use those tools, I use this newsletter to sift my learnings and tech reading.

Watched

Using sort the proper way in Python:
That was clever and opened a few mind doors of thinking stuff clearly about keys , the way sorted takes in a list or an iterable is interesting and opens it to a wide variety of options to use it to throw into.

How to Finish Programming Projects?
This is a interesting and eye opener video, I initially used to create projects by taking it as a learning opportunity, but gradually the path to creating something big or focusing on the features too much caused a friction and lead to whole lot of issues in the way. One is burnout, the other is no progress at all instead of tiny day-by-day progress.
What did you just do, CSS?
Those are some high-value changes in CSS, I am not much into CSS but looking at the added changes, it seems to be a lot and a game changer to some extent. Turing complete :)
FreeCodeCamp (Quincy Larson) interview with Tech with Tim
This is a good talk, while growing up as a developer, I watched Tim while learning Python and Django, so he has been a teacher to me in some way or the other, and seeing his raw thoughts behind his life, feels good to listen to.
Write your own programming Language: Computerphile
This was an interesting one, the power of the `SPLIT` function in python really should be the title of this video, just kidding. But the approach is what makes me wonder if that’s the way programming languages are created, really.
That is a bit obnoxious to think in that way, it will become quite a mess after a while (I am not talking about his code but just the approach). I thaught it would be like the theory of computing of state machines right?

Learned

Learned how to install and build golang from source for the latest versions as described here.

The difference between setdefault and defaultdict

I learned that setdefault adds a key with a default value only if explicitly accessed, like this:

my_dict = {'a': 1}  

my_dict.setdefault('b', 100)  
# Adds 'b': 100 only if 'b' doesn't exist

print(my_dict)  # {'a': 1, 'b': 100}

On the other hand, defaultdict automatically assigns a default value for missing keys:

from collections import defaultdict  

my_dict = defaultdict(int)  

my_dict['a'] += 1  # Initializes 'a' with 0, then increments it  

print(my_dict)  # {'a': 1}

Learned about the iterator in Golang
The iter package released in Golang 1.23 introduces Seq and Seq2 for custom sequence iteration in Go. Using these, you can define custom iterators that yield values or key-value pairs dynamically

Tech News

Android 16: Developer Preview
This is really amazing, the terminal emulator concept really is cool but surely it will be revamped and improved Google supporting this on Android is in itself a big thing in my opinion. It will increase adaptability of terminals and make it really easier for anyone to use and interact with them.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for daily developer articles, join daily.dev

That’s it from this week, hope you did well this week, and have a happy week and weekend ahead!

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week.

Happy Coding :)

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #16

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Week #16

This week was really productive, was able to make the code I have been writing for the past 2 months and experiments that have been doing into a deployable and ready to launch code. I finally feel a bit satisfied by my efforts, feel the motivation back, the curiosity back. I had an intense focus or flow state this week, I did not create any content this week as I was out on Sunday and was really tired on Saturday.

But this weekend, I am planning to create some 4 short tidbits of Golang videos. Also planning for a livestream, let’s see how that goes.

Stats for the week

Made one release with some minor changes and bug fixes

Plans for the next week

Tidbit Video for Golang 1.24 release features
Init the SSG with DB project live stream

Quote of the week

"The key to success is not in what you do once, but in what you do repeatedly."

This is the vibe of the weeks, I have been doing things repeatedly over the span of 6 weeks. I have kept up with my writing routine, some days are rough but some days I am tough. It is important to go through the bad days in order to get the fulfilment and bring the best of us.

Read

How Cosiine Similarity Works: This is a good read for understanding the cosine or vector similarity. This is really important to understand in the context of today’s fast-paced AI and LLM world, understanding the tokens and the embedding similarity between them. It might not seem oblivious but having an understanding of the essence of the logic behind the things happening around you makes life a lot easier.
INodes in Linux and FIlesystems: I found this while researching for INODE busting from the video of the Git course walkthrough from Primeagen on Boot.dev
Avoid Select * in SQL: This is really helpful, always need to be explicit instead of being lazy or over-cautious in case would need that field in the future. There are two things here, one is being explicit and the other is dynamic for future changes, just in case the other fields might be required later.

Watched

Python 3.13 Replace Function
This is really neat, I see myself using this to mutate objects in tight data-oriented programs or applications.
Turso LibSQL Video from Fireship
Finally Fireship creating a video on Turso’ s LibSQL, this deserved attention and its finally getting the love it deserves.

Have you heard of Orion? It is worse than Gippty!
This is such a funny and satisfying video, it brings such relief to hear each word. programmers are not replaceable because we write bad code that works :)

Learned

What is INode (Index Nodes) used in Linux file systems: The was really interesting piece of concept in Linux, if you have been using Linux for a while and have kept a directory with loads of files, then something wired happens, not sure what but something off happens, I have experienced it. And this seems to be the reason for it, pretty neat of git using this to store commit hashes in this way.
How to iterate over the df rows and mutate the values: We can use the iterrows to iterate over the rows and use the `at` with the index and the column name to mutate the field by setting it to the required value.

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({
    'A': [1, 2, 3],
    'B': [4, 5, 6]
})

for index, row in df.iterrows():
    df.at[index, 'A'] = row['A'] * 2

print(df)

#    A  B
# 0  2  4
# 1  4  5
# 2  6  6

Tech News

Can we have a moment of silence for the ones who thought Programmers were replaceable?

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for daily developer articles, join daily.dev

That’s it from this week, hope you did well this week, and have a happy week and weekend ahead!

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week.

Happy Coding :)

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #15

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Week #15

A wonderful week, bringing back the joy of programming, after some slumpy weeks, a refreshing and mind challenging week. The start was drowzy after a long weekend, but as the week progressed, I had to shift gears and complete the things that took some deep concentration and thinking, finally the results were worth the efforts. Everything in its place, the reward for the focus and hard work.

After a live stream and video creation in the end of week last week, I didn’t do much on Sunday, just took a break and spent the diwali removing the negativity in life. I am not mentioning it enough but I continue the writing routine, 35 days and counting, the writing streak is un-broken, I completed one section of writing of 21 days and now moving on to another section of 17 days, combining a total of (9+21+5(till date)) 35 articles. This is the motivation for me waking up everyday, writing will get me to the places I can dream of.

Stats for the week

FIxed a ton of bugs
Brainstormed on refactoring code

Plans for the next week

Create 2 articles
Record 1 videos
Live Stream at least once

Quote of the week

"Strength doesn’t come from what you can do. It comes from overcoming the things you once thought you couldn’t."
— Rikki Rogers

I once thought before the week, that this week will be the make or break week for the things I have been doing for the past months, and finally in the end was able to break shakles and get into deep programming flow state, it felt good, it felt energetic, removing the guilt and imposter syndrome that has been creeping in.

Strength is not what you have, it is about learning what you don’t. It is about taking the challenge head on.

Read

Writing for developers:
This is really a good read, writing brings clarity and clarity is what shapes you to pick up correct directions while developing anything. All the time, I start to write an article, I ran off a tangent on one or the other interesting thing that I had no idea about and assumed I knew it.
How to become a Good Backend Engineer
This is really well summarised and insightful read for me at least, it gives a birds-eye view and ignites a curiosity to dive deeper into a specific topic or domain, which is essential for any developer.

Watched

Building ChatGPT like LLM Model on a small scale from scratch:
I have not completed it but just understanding the architecture and what the LLM does is vital to work and adapt to the changes in the evolving world.

Learned

TikToken the tokeniser that powers GPT and its family of models: I want to explore this and create a project around it. I learnt that is the model that actually determines the number of tokens passed around the chats while interacting with the LLMs.

Using the next method in python to get the first non-empty or truth value from a dict or any expression.

row = {
    "name": {
        "value": "123",
        "position": [40, 40],
    },
    "city": {
        "value": "mumbai",
        "position": [50, 30],
    }
}
row_position = next((attrs["position"] for attrs in row.values() if isinstance(attrs, dict) and attrs.get("value")), None)

Combining Pandas Dataframes

Let’s say I have a list of dataframes, i want to combine them with certain number but not the contents, just append the next df to the end of the current df. I used the pd.concat function to combine the slices of pandas dataframe in a single list.

PAGE_LIMIT = 2
PAGES = 5

for i in range(0, PAGES, PAGE_LIMIT):
    if i + PAGE_LIMIT <= num_of_pages:
        df_batch = pd.concat(df_list[i:i + PAGE_LIMIT], axis=0)
    else:
        df_batch = pd.concat(df_list[i:], axis=0)

Deleting elements from the list given the indices
I know this could be easily gotten from GPT but feels good to do it yourself sometimes.

def delete_elements_by_indices(lst, indices):
    indices_set = set(indices)
    return [item for idx, item in enumerate(lst) if idx not in indices_set]


lst = [10, 20, 30, 40, 50]
indices_to_delete = [1, 3]
result = delete_elements_by_indices(lst, indices_to_delete)
print(result) 
# Output: [10, 30, 50]

Fun tidbit,

Chat GPT search is just awesome, it recognises me? really?

Even my youtube channel which is barely 2 months old

Tech News

Hertz.dev launches the conversational audio generator model
Stripe launches Workbench: A new way to debug, monitor, and grow your Stripe integration

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for daily developer articles, join daily.dev

That’s it from this week, hope you did well this week, and have a happy week and weekend ahead!

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week.

Happy Coding :)

Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Techstructive Weekly #14

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Week #14

This was an excellent week, I created one video, posted one article, did a live stream setup went live for an hour on Twitch and Youtube, and did some exercise as well—writing of course with the 4th consecutive week.

The week was super-productive to start with, like I had a dream Sunday, I went on a walk in the morning, 6:30 AM, right? I have been procrastinating for months, but finally started doing since this Sunday. And I cannot say how much benefit I had from these walks like there is some energy flowing in me after I come from the walk. There is the fire ignited back, the curiosity flying back, the spark is back and with the habits like this newsletter and others in place, It looks like a dream routine, and it gets better and better. Not gonna Jinx it for the next week.

Stats for the week

Fixed 8 bugs
Created one article post (2k words)
Created a video (20 mins)
Live Stream for an hour (planning a project)
Wrote around 10k words of content

Plans for the next week

Create 2 articles
Record 3 videos
Live Stream at least twice

Quote of the week

"Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare."
— Angela Duckworth

This is a good read, motivating to be honest. The start always is the least painful, we quite quickly pick a youtube video to watch but rarely finish it, quickly start with a new year resolution, and falter way too quickly (let’s do at least 2 weeks this year, come on), but the reward on enduring it and keeping up with it is quite a treat.

Read

Using Go Embed: This is really handy and I just used it while researching and creating the video for SQLC. This was really a handy trick and feature in Go, to inject some raw strings or content from files, for instance, it helps in injecting the raw SQL queries from files to the golang program and executes them programmatically. This is commonly used with static files and templating as well I guess.
Taming the beast: Django ORM: Django is a beast when it comes to ORM, but I have started getting back from Django, as I don’t get to go a bit low-level, I can’t write raw SQL. But I am grateful and really happy that I started with Django, it helped me land my first internship and help me understand the terms in the tech. This was the major reason I started blogging and haven’t stopped since then. I went off on a tangent here, but Django ORM is great if you want to do something sophisticated with the data structures that would have in the database.

Created

Wrote: Creating and Working with Embedded Replicas of LibSQL Database hosted on Turso in a Golang Project: I already have created a video on this, so just created an outline and wrote the article on my blog. I find this approach good, it helps me solidify the learnings from the knowledge that I gained from making the video and adding more examples and use-cases.
Video: Using SQLC with LibSQL Database in a Golang Project:
Created a video after 3 weeks, but felt good after creating this. This is the fourth video in the Let’s Go with Turso Series.
Blog: Created a blog for the writing that I have been doing for the past month. I don’t want to share it here, since that is not related to tech. I created a hugo site and added a blowfish theme to it, really got it right on the first try deploy to Cloudflare pages. In to the groove.

Watched

Github Copilot just dropped the bomb on AI Code editor startups:

Learned

Using SQLC to generate go code from raw typed SQL. This is a great tool by the way, I really wanted to write SQL, but the frameworks and tools just make sure you don’t write the SQL yourselves, they generate them for you, which I appreciate that but also they should give the freedom to write raw SQL. SQLC is a really productive and awesome tool for SQL lovers (ORM Haters) and not for ORM lovers (Just kidding, it’s just a tool).
You can embed some content from a file or any place with these `go:embed` tags, this is soo cool. I actually did it for embedding the RAW SQL queries for executing them in the SQLC library.

Tech News

GitHub Universe 2024: There is baggage to be unloaded here. Definitely a lot of AI, but also a lot of other stuff as well. I guess the AI hype is no more hype, it has become a reality, we need to accept it more I guess. But not blindly.
OpenAI launching ChatGPT Search: I mean Bing and Llama almost do this, so nothing fancy here, but the scale with ChatGPT would do it needs to be tested, seems a bit intriguing to be honest. This could be the tool that developers will use instead of Google search maybe in the next year. who knows?

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for daily developer articles, join daily.dev

That’s it from this week, hope you did well this week, and have a happy week and weekend ahead!

Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week.

Happy Coding :)

Also Happy Diwali (Shubh Deepavali, may your life be filled with light soon, you will find hope, just believe) and Happy Halloween!

Techstructive Weekly #13

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Week #13

This was a pretty rough week, some mundane tasks at work, not that mundane but felt off track on the mind. Nothing going on in my life, just that the past things that have happened have slowed down and now feel the sense of pain and consequences in the future. Don’t know what I am talking really, but as always there is hope in me, I am continuing to write a mythological blog of mine for almost 21 days which is 3 weeks, yes that is a daily one post. At least some things in life are good.

Related to technical stuff, I was off from mental creativity for most of the week, feeling drained and wrenched.

However, I did complete a non-fiction, non-technical book through the past weekend, and felt good reading that.

Quote of the week

“Sometimes, when things are falling apart, they may actually be falling into place”

This is just my life right now, I don’t know anything happening to me right now, I am just waking up and banging in the day with a pinch of salt to survive, that is not the right mentality I know, but there’s a fear of burnout and losing the job at hand in this tough times, so just keeping the grind on is the solution for me I guess.

I can just hope to fall in place, things are messy but from the overall picture of life, I hope they are heading towards where they should be.

This Quote tweet by me, sums up my technical writing routine slump

Read

What 100 coding taught me: I felt the article was a bit off-track by introducing code samples, that could have been simplified, but such is the complexity of developers’ life, can’t simplify complex things as they are indeed complex.
How I cured my procrastination: This feels like an epidemic of happiness, the enthusiasm and humility in the author’s words are evident and make you jump out of the procrastination loop hell. Worth reading.

Watched

Git reset vs Git revert:
This is really well explained, I never have thought or discovered that these things also exist.
Git Bisect
Never found a situation to use this, but man, this would be soo handy to know.
Best Engineering interview question I’ve ever gotten:
This was a reaction of the MemSQL multiply command or functionality addition in the C codebase with time constraints, It was really not challenging but would make a lot of things clear and open about the developer in an interview.

Learnt

Learned about Exponential Backoff: It is like a retry strategy that gradually increases the wait time between attempts to reduce system load and improve stability, often doubling the delay after each failed try. I used it to try out OpenAI API calls.

Tech News

Claude Bombs tech with its Computer Use: This is like an automation testing tool with AI, I would say. Testing tools like selenium or hardcoded replay stuff, but this is the evolution of those tools.
Turso with its Launch Week 3: Embedding support, No Cold starts, 7 SDKs added, Offline writes, this is a banger of a launch week from Turso, taking SQLite to the moon! (It actually is used already)
Turbot with its Launch Week 6: A great launch week for TUrbot with the v1.0 release for all flagship products like steampipe, flowpipe, and powerpipe.
Notion Releases Email, Forms, Layouts, Automation: I think this usually doesn’t work out well for companies or products, but Notion just might pull it off, something about them is aesthetically pleasing but speed is bugging me to use it.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for daily developer articles, join daily.dev

That’s it from this week, hope you did well this week, and have a happy week and weekend ahead!

Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week.

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #12

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Week #12

This week, was a bit of a realization that I need to improve as a junior developer, I need to do something important and exciting. These past few months have been tiring mentally, but need to up the effort and get some serious business rolling in.

I will be looking to write more articles based on the videos I create in the upcoming months.

This week, I worked a bit harder than usual, to do my two modes of being. One as a developer, and the other as a writer, I have been writing non-fictional, spiritual, and mythological writing on the side for almost 2 weeks now. I feel really positive, I am able to get things done quickly and appreciate life more gratefully.

Stats for the week

5 bugs fixed
1 Report of experimentations created
4 detailed debugging sessions

Quote of the week

“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing."
— Walt Disney

This sums up really well how I have been feeling lately, I need to get things done. I did the exact thing for this newsletter to go live, just write the things I am doing, and it has helped me to realize where I am spending my time, where I am learning and doing more.

I want to inculcate this as a daily routine, to log out stuff that I find exciting, this like won’t be every day, but having that excitement to write things every time I find something interesting is really satisfying.

Read

Lessons from the Smartest developers I’ve worked with:
I completely agree with this point. I feel on the writer’s side, I sometimes come up with weird ideas that don’t align with the business improvement and write shabby saphegetti code on the first try.
From Tech Docs To Blog Posts: I have been writing technical/non-technical articles in tech from almost the beginning of my career. It was another way of re-learning and making my knowledge even firm.
Strategize Your Career
✍️ From Tech Docs to Blog Posts: How Writing Can Transform Your Career
You probably don’t care about tech influencers telling you about their writing journey…
Read more
a year ago · 82 likes · 11 comments · Fran Soto

Watched

What is __init__.py: A basic video, but really important for getting things right when working with organized python code.

Making games, not just games, just anything as long as it is exciting and fun to learn. I had a lot of projects, not any project was big but small individual projects that I made to solve some or the other problems that I faced.

Learnt

Adding a theme to the Hugo site(SSG): It involves a git submodule which if we try to tweak the theme, won’t be committed in the git repo that our own website is being used for. To make changes in the theme, we need to make the fork of the theme and then use it as a separate theme and not as a git submodule.
Postgres has numeric and float types: Numeric for precise and large values, float for loose values but are faster.
Postgres has multi-schema in a single database, as opposed to a single schema type in MySQL. SQLite → single file, MySQL → single server, multiple databases, PostgreSQL → single server, multiple databases → multiple schemas. All have multiple tables within a single database but PostgreSQL can have multiple schemas that we can use to create multiple tables per schema.

Shoutout

Mastering Postgres Course by Aaron Francis: I have been lately watching the course videos of PostgreSQL by Aaron Francis. The quality of content is top-notch, and everything taught is driven by proof, this is really sticking and excellent. HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT!

For tech news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for daily developer articles, join daily.dev

That’s it from this week, hope you did well this week, and have a happy week and weekend ahead!

Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week.

Leave a comment

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #11

Sat, 12 Oct 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Week #11

This week was good in terms of writing. I started a new endeavor: a blog. It is not technical; it is related to mythology and finding its meaning in the modern world. I kept a consistent writing routine for nine days. Nine posts in nine days looks like a good start for my writing routine. I will try to continue this routine throughout the month.

Moving on to the technical things, I wrote a lot less code than usual but read a lot of code for debugging and understanding existing flows.

Stats for the week

2 bugs fixed, and 1 bug found
Wrote around 30k words (not technical)
Read 3 blog posts
Listening 1 podcast
Learned 3 concepts

Plans for the next week

2 posts on Golang and Turso/LibSQL
One video at least on SQLC and Golang with LibSQL Database
Create 2 blog from static site generators

Quote of the week

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful."
— Albert Schweitzer

Success is the goal, and happiness is the process. If one can be happy in the process, it is already a great journey. Love the craft not the goal.

Read

Refrain from the usage of dicts in the business logic in Python:
I agree with this point, because the way dicts behave in complex structured code mess, is really hard to debug and trace.
What is new in Python 3.13:
This is a big release in Python. It actually revamped the REPL experience to a new level. There is also the experimental addition of the JIT compiler.
Data model behind the Notion’s flexibility:
The component-based model for Notion suits it really well. They used the right tools and architecture for the right job.

Watched

Communication in Engineering is vital, if technical skills are important then soft skills are the most important thing to have as a software engineer. If you can’t understandably express your thoughts, that could be a bit disadvantage to be honest. I personally struggle with this, I can communicate, but I am bit bad at it, I am trying to improve my vocal ability to express what is in my head effectively. I can write my thoughts really well, but when it comes to speaking, its a bit hard for me.

Learnt

Setting up Hugo static site generator
Python poetry installation and installing dependencies

Tech News

Open AI releases AI Canvas

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for daily developer articles, join daily.dev

That’s it from this week, hope you did well this week, and have a happy week and weekend ahead!

Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week.

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #10

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Week #10

Wrapping up the third quarter with a burst of energy! This week felt more mentally demanding, but as the week closed, I realized that even small progress is still progress. Sometimes, numbers don’t tell the whole story—they can shift perceptions or even mislead. I believe in valuing the journey more than the destination, and this week’s coding, learning, and creating was worth more than any metric can show.

This week, I did some programming, not much, but the weekend was super productive. I wrote an article, created a video, and also learned a lot of things about golang, docker, and SQLite.

Stats for the week

Articles written: 1
Videos Created: 1
Concepts learned: 2
Code Lines Written: ~500
Bugs Caught: 4
Articles Read: 3
Videos Watched: 3
Books Pages Read: 37 (fiction+non-fiction)

Plans for the next week

Creating a video about SQLC library with LibSQL database
Crossposting and cleaning up the article on remote LibSQL database connection in Golang
Contribute to one of the open source projects: Steampipe, MindsDB, Turso, Appwrite

Quote of the week

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
— William Bruce Cameron

This sums up my week really well. I worked hard to get things up and running, making tweaks, and shifting directions. But in the end, it boiled down to numbers. For me, though, the process was more important than the final metrics. The process helped me reshape my mindset, shift my perspective, and adapt to different conditions as the problem evolved. I suppose I learned to embrace change and gain more insights than the numbers suggest.

Read

Interfaces in Golang: ByteSizeGo: Interfaces are really important in making certain applications, but more important is how to use them effectively and whether to use them or not in your specific problems.
NotebookLM has got everyone in a daze about LLMs and podcasts: I just dropped my portfolio link and it just spits out some compliments after compliments about my journey as a developer. It actually said certain things that I myself haven’t thought of someone viewing me, a couple of things were rubbish for sure, but it was pretty much factual.

Wrote

Connecting a remote LibSQL database hosted on Turso in Golang
This is a write-up for my first-ever YouTube video which after 3 weeks has got around 200 views which is fascinating. Hmm, numbers are wired. After creating a video, the process of writing the article seems so smooth and easy as all the hard work is done, it’s just about to flush out the idea into words.

Created

Setup LibSQL Database server, SQLD locally using Docker and Connecting with Golang:
I also went ahead and created my 3rd video in the series “Let’s Go with Turso” covering how to setup a LibSQL database which is called SQLD locally using Docker and then connecting and querying with a Golang program.

Watched

Tips for handling timezones in Postgres:
It is quite weird and frustrating to manage timezones as a developer it seems.

I have watched very less YouTube for the past two weeks, it is the effect of creating content, consuming less, and creating more.

Learnt

Doker: Mounting volumes with the directory in the system and point it to a location in the container for persistence
To create a mounted volume, you need to specify the host directory path and the directory path inside the container.
```
docker run -v /path/on/host:/path/in/container image-name
```
I used it to mount sqlite db from the local file path to the container of sqld to mount the default db used to serve the libsql database like this:
```
docker run -p 8080:8080 -ti \
-v $(pwd)/data.sqld/:/var/lib/sqld/data/ \
ghcr.io/tursodatabase/libsql-server:latest
```
I am learning about memory management with the course on boot.dev: This course has been made by TJ devries, If you don’t know him, you are missing out on some serious Neovim and Ocaml Shenanigans on Twitter and Twitch. I am not gonna miss this masterpiece while it’s fresh, I know the basics of C, and I should be able to learn the more advanced nuances of memory management.

Tech News

NotebookLM is the buzz, people are creating actual podcasts from certain pieces of aggregated content, pretty impressive to be honest
https://notebooklm.google/
Meta AI launches Movie Gen model that generates realistic audio and video. AI trend seems to be never-ending, each week there is one or the other model being released, taking over the other by the barest of margin but looking like a huge growth.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#718 has not yet been published but will soon as usual), and for daily developer articles, join daily.dev

That’s it from this week, hope you did well this week, and have a happy week and weekend ahead!

Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week.

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #9

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Week #9

This week was a bit of refreshing as I was able to write some code, bunch of experimentation and feeling a bit back after some slump in the past week. Need to get one video out this weekend to get into the habit. This October I will be trying to build my own writing routine, it won’t be for technical articles, but I won’t be surprised if I find it helpful to write more technical articles.

This week, I had times where I said, I can still solve problems, Look LLMs you are still idiot. The next day, it just helped me just a function with some function signature and proper data type of parameters and return value. I am not saying, LLMs are complete idiots, but they don’t have sense what they are talking about, they sound like they have, but no, sorry. I would love to improve my productivity, by that I mean to speed up my process for searching, copy pasting from elsewhere, scrambling all over the internet to understand something. It just is like a little pipeline, I throw at it some things, If it makes sense to me, I accept, else I trash it, back to old ways.

I will be making up for the last week slump, I said in the quote

“Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow”
— Mary Anne Radmacher

Here I am proving it, I am excited to get into the weekend, pumped up and ready for a change in habits and routine. Last week I was frustrated, maybe burned out, I practically didn’t do anything last weekend, but I din’t quit, I said will be back next week.

Actually last week I had my convocation, I remembered it now. The Saturday, the whole day went in that, hanging out with friends, maybe for the last time officially. It feels a bit bitter-sweet that I completed 4 years of the degree college.

Quote of the week

""Fall seven times, stand up eight."
— Japanese Proverb

The past few weeks were tough for me, not as any bad thing, but just things are bit off for me. This week, I still showed up and tackled every thing that came my way, successful or not, I am still standing and doing the thing I love, debugging code :)

Keep walking

Read

How important is Clarity and Kindness in Engineering: Clarity and Kindness, this are really important in any field, but for engineering especially as the dynamics of software development requires patience and focus, which are result of clarity and kindness.
The Caring Techie Newsletter
How to Cultivate Clarity and Kindness in Your Engineering Team
Throughout my career in different Tech jobs - from Software Engineer to Tech Lead Manager - I often faced unclear situations…
Read more
a year ago · 21 likes · 2 comments · Irina Stanescu
Different way of working with SQL in Golang
packagemain.tech
Different ways of working with SQL Databases in Go
Different programming languages have their own ways of working with relational databases and SQL. Ruby on Rails has its Active Record, Python has SQLAlchemy, Typescript - Drizzle, etc. Go, being a language with quite diverse standard library which includes well-known…
Read more
a year ago · 9 likes · Alex Pliutau
Generating music with AI and Python : I actually went ahead and tried a few words to check that out. It actually creates some sound, though it takes time and is bit off track and I actually don’t know what would be the right words for that music that comes to my mind, so I would be experimenting with it just for fun.
The New Era of Writing Code: This is so relatable, I was just using some AI to wire up some functions and making it easier at certain task, but worse at the other, I won’t be surprised to see something like a AI Stack in the upcoming months, Like a set of Models, Providers, templates and prompt cheat sheet for developers and other tasks.
The Developing Dev
A New Era of Writing Code
Large language models (LLM) will change how software engineers write code forever…
Read more
a year ago · 144 likes · 19 comments · Ryan Peterman

Watched

Chat with DHH, TJ Devries and The Primeagen:
This is worth the 2 hours. I would say that much, it is fun and at the same time, so much value for a junior as well any software developer (leaving out the kids part XD)
Mult DB Schema in Turso
Learn how to create child databases from a parent database keeping the same schema, using Turso CLI, this will make any changes on schema of parent db get reflected on the child db.

Learnt

Setup a sqld server with docker: I was checking out SQLD, a server daemon for LibSQL, a SQLite fork database. This is really handy for connecting a sqlite-like database over the network. I am using docker for running it locally and it is a breeze to set it up.
Download LLMs locally with ollama: I was quite impressed by the speed of the LLAMA 3.2 1B model. It worked smoothly, on my 8GB laptop. This would be quite handy in case of network issues, vendor outages and other politics.
LLM package in python by Simon Wilson: This is neat and handy for experimenting and playing around with sophisticated techniques to solve certain problems or even debugging certain hands on problems.

Tidbits of Advice/Quotes/Rambling from others

“College Grads take their work as work, but self taught take it as a hobby, an interesting observation”: Twitter Not trying to quote anyone just agreeing on it.

Tech News

Meta releases LLAMA 3.2 models with lightweight Text (1b and 3b paramters) and multi-modal models(11b and 90b parameters). Read Simon Wilson’s post on his thoughts.
Mark Zuckerberg says Meta AI has nearly 500 million users : That is quite the number, really who is using these model? Is it that good? and how are they tracking these as I know these could be used locally as well.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for daily developer articles, join daily.dev

That’s it from this week, hope you did well this week, and have a happy week and weekend ahead!

Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week.

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #8

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Week #8

This week was quite a slow one for me, I didn’t write much code, but I did some thinking and debugging deep into configurations. I want to say this, that’s it, not in the mood for a rant this week.

Quote of the week

“Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’”
— Mary Anne Radmacher

The quote is really apt for the week for me, I actually had no or very little progress this week, maybe I was a little distracted with life, but that doesn’t mean I quit this newsletter, I will show up, I will write it even I have nothing to write, When I read this in the future, I will be proud when I wrote when no one was reading, no one was watching me. I will try again next week.

Read

Things I wished more developers knew about Databases: This covers the myths and misconceptions about databases that are ignored by developers, or are often mistreated while doing the actual problem-solving even on the higher level.
Good Software Development Habits: These are some valuable experiences that will change the way you work as a developer to some level, it might make you a better developer.

Wrote/Created

LibSQL Embedded Replicas on Turso in Golang
I created my second youtube video, this took considerably less time for the voice over but the video content was really time consuming to make the final edit. But i enjoyed the process of creating the flow video.

Watched

Notion cut latency by 20% using SQLite
This is such an insightful video, by neetcode, the content is really worth watching, to the point and really a lot of thins learnt. A lot of concepts like Web workers which I am not even aware of, using SQLite in browser with WASM feels really powerful.
5 Good Practises in Python
New Python 3.13 REPL is so cool
The python REPL looks really cool and will significantly improve the developer experience with this release, the block navigation is really handy and so frustrating at certain times.

Learnt

Using LibSQL/SQLite embedded replicas on Turso
- Created some examples for using embedded replicas in Golang for the video, and will shortly push the changes to GitHub as well.
- Understanding on a high level how embedded replicas work and where they could fit the software landscape.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for daily developer articles, join daily.dev

That’s it from this week, hope you did well this week, and have a happy week and weekend ahead!

Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week.

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #7

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Week #7

This week was a bit mentally tough but technically productive, pushed some efforts to get the project up and integrated fully and tested it out. Not good with the numbers but overall, that looked promising, and again excited for next week’s challenge.

This week is special because I created and uploaded my first YouTube video! On Sunday, I did everything from recording to creating the thumbnail, voiceover, and editing. It took about six hours for a six-minute video, but it’s a solid start for future videos. I’d love any feedback you have, so please check it out!

Quote of the week

“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”
— Zig Ziglar

I created my first YouTube video, it might not be the greatest one, but surely one day one video will be. Pondering over 5 years from now, if that video becomes great, I’ll come back to my first video and laugh—where I started, with a humble and overlooked video. But that will be the one that leads me to that.

Read

One-Year Writing Journey: This is really a good read of a person trying to be consistent at writing, I have personally done this for over two years. I found it really helpful in gaining experience and problem-solving abilities.
Month Without a Smartphone: I could feel myself, but in place of his son, I depicted my mother scolding me to put the phone down. I mean there is nothing urgent or important on the phone, but feels like I am going to miss something important at any hour. This habit needs to be taken care of by me.
Writing a book in the age of Open Source: There are so many good resources and advice on starting and investing in the craft of writing.

Incremental forgetting

Writing a book in the age of open source

About a year ago, Maxim Schepelin and I set out to write our first book. A book for aspiring Engineering Managers…

a year ago · 6 likes · Dunya Kirkali

Wrote/Created

Youtube Video: How to connect a remote LibSQL Databsae on Turso with a Golang Application/Program:

Watched

LLMS are like wired, over-confident Interns:
LLMs are powerful but not quite there yet, they are idiots sometimes, and they literally do what was not said to be done (they can’t push to prod yet)

Software Misadventures Podcast

LLMs are like your weird, over-confident intern | Simon Willison (Datasette)

a year ago · 1 like · Ronak Nathani and Guang Yang

Nobody Cares about Technical GitHub Projects:
Project clones are not gonna help your resume, something that you taught and build just to solve a problem you faced or just writing something from scratch, probably is going to land you somewhere. That is the gist, making GitHub projects is not the only deal, making something that you learn from should be.

Safe and Best Way to Open Files in Python:
I don’t thing anyone uses any other approach than with, for dealing with files in python, if he does then, you probably need to think again.

Why you should learn Golang as a first programming language:
Golang is such a programming language that just lands in the middle of complex syntax and speed. There is a garbage collector which makes it developer friendly most of the time, yet not being interpreted like python and javascript, which makes it faster, not just executing wise but development time as well. Totally worth learning as the first programming language.

Learned

Iterating over a dataframe’s rows using iterrows:
I wanted to iterate over all the df rows and also needed to get the index of each of them, so iterrows is so convenient to use.
Golang: Connecting a remote LibSQL database
- Using libsql-client for golang
- Sync local libsql/sqlite database with Embedded replicas.

Next week will have an article about this things as well as a video.

Tech News

OpenAI released o1: A model series for reasoning and solving scientific problems. People suggesting it to be better than they expected. But I think, the LLMs have disappointed us so much that even a little spike causes us to think its a big deal, it is a revolutionary model, but wait for 6 months and read this blog again.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (Issue 716 is not out yet as of my publishing but should be soon) and for daily developer articles, join daily.dev

That’s it from this week, hope you did well this week, and have a happy week and weekend ahead!

Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week.

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #6

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Week #6

This week was all about diving deep into the details of my projects. After weeks of building, I spent this week debugging and testing everything, pushing things to the next level. My goal was to have a working demo by the end of the week, which I started on Wednesday—and I’m happy to report that I almost hit the mark. There’s always room for improvement, but the testing phase went as planned, and the hypothesis is holding up.

I’m pumped for next week at work, where I’ll be wrapping up some key integrations. Once again, LLMs are proving to be game-changers.

Quote of the week

"The secret of life is to fall seven times and to get up eight times."
— Paulo Coelho

I failed at the start of my week, I had poor results from the experimentation that I did, that was me limiting myself to the things I knew and got very rigid in the approach, but just a single change of thought, and guidance from my manager got me straight from nowhere to somewhere I wanted to be, where he knew I should be. This is the result of showing up eight times, after failing seven times. Keep showing up, even if you fail, fail harder, or go the rock bottom, you will learn or discover something new for sure and that’s growth, that’s winning, much better than becoming invincible.

Read

Leave Something for tomorrow:
I kind of partially agree with this, sometimes I just want to get that thing done, and sometimes I’ll let it be in the half-finished state knowing what to do next just to pick up the next day with the same momentum. This point actually contradicts the point of the flow state, where you are immersed in thought and a process so much that you don’t know the flow of time.
Register Spill
Leave something for tomorrow
One of my favorite things to do…
Read more
a year ago · 23 likes · 1 comment · Thorsten Ball
Consistency is Harder than you think:
It is definitely harder to keep doing things over a period of time, not because they are hard, but because things intertwine in life, making you distracted and causing a sense of emergency to act on. This tests your persistence and patience, believe me, it is not difficult, it is just about diverting your mind to doing it anyway.
Made with tech, seasoned with life
Consistency is harder than you think
You've probably heard in movies or read somewhere that it takes 21 days to form a habit. It's true and totally doable. The tough part is waking up every day and sticking to it for those 21 days, and even longer to really get good at it…
Read more
a year ago · 4 likes · 4 comments · Haimantika Mitra
Do it anyways:
The Sublime
Creatively stuck? A moodboard
There’s a certain voice I hear in my head whenever I’m creatively stuck…
Read more
a year ago · 48 likes · 3 comments · Alex Dobrenko`

Wrote

Safely using Maps in Golang: Differences in declaration and initialization
I said in the previous newsletter that I would write this article and I did it in the previous weekend. The title I thought versus what is actually there is quite different, I had a very specific problem with url.Values getting nil pointer access if not initiated, but I found out the underlying type is a map in golang, So this learning became applicable to maps in general. This is the reason I like to write blog posts, I get a deeper understanding of the problems and solutions than what I thought I knew of.

Watched

Retrieval Augmented Generation:
For anyone new to LLMs and RAG, this video might be helpful to understand what exactly is a RAG method to prompt to the LLM. Nicely explained.
AWS CEO says the end of programmers is near:
This is such a lame thing, how could a 40-year-old industry wipe out in such a small amount of time, it will take at least decades to wipe out the gigantic pile of code.
Boot.dev Season 1 Final Episode: Origins of Boot.dev
This is an incredible journey of the backend developer gamified platform. This serves as an inspiration that a side project can become a full-time hustle.

Learnt

url.Values in golang is a map under the hood, that’s so obvious but never thought about it. Now it is so clear that those will be a map of strings and list of strings.
Python joblib to parallelize functions: This is one of the libraries and ideas that I learned in my daily work to get things done. I used it basically to call a function with a list of arguments (different) multiple calls at the same time to save time. So, if a single function call takes 10 seconds and I have 3 function calls to make, sequentially it would take 30 seconds but with parallel calls, those could be done with just over 10 seconds.

Using set.update to append a list of keys of a dictionary: Let’s say I have a list of dictionaries of some sort, I want to keep track of all the unique keys in those dictionaries, the dirty and the long way would be this:

tables = [
    {"id": 1, "name": "Alice", "age": 25, "email": "alice@example.com"},
    {"id": 2, "name": "Bob", "city": "New York", "phone": "555-1234"},
    {"id": 3, "country": "USA", "zip": "12345", "email": "charlie@example.com"},
    {"id": 4, "name": "Dana", "state": "California", "city": "San Francisco"}
]

unique_keys = set()

for table in tables:
    for key in table:
        unique_keys.add(key)

print(unique_keys)

# {'id', 'name', 'age', 'email', 'city', 'phone', 'country', 'zip', 'state'}

A more cleaner way would be this:

for table in tables:
    unique_keys.update(table.keys())

OpenAI Function Call is not good compared to non-functional prompts. By functional prompt I mean the structure of the response is provided as an object and the LLM has to respond adhering to that structure, this looks good, but not sure why it goofs up the actual text provided to it. Whereas with the normal(non-functional) prompt the response is much better, as we have more control over the things that can be added, validations, and specific structure. I am surprised that normal prompts can also give responses in a structured way that is too consistent.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for daily developer articles, join daily.dev

That’s it from this week, I hope you did well this week, and have a happy week and weekend ahead!

Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week.

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #5

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Week #5

This week felt like a slog, with many challenges and frustrations. However, by the end of the week, I found my stride and got excited about the direction I’m heading. It's amazing how quickly things can shift from feeling like the end of the world to experiencing a burst of excitement.

I also managed to get the side project of the Meta AI API wrapper in Golang correctly, over the weekend will polish this project and also fix the bug in the Chat GPT anonymous client in Python.

Quote of the week

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts."
— Winston Churchill

As a developer, you will experience both triumphs and challenges. Your journey might feel like a rollercoaster, swinging from highs to lows in a single day. Embrace the mantra: Build, Iterate, Release. There is no ultimate success or failure, and no product is ever perfect. What matters is the continuous improvement and learning you gain along the way.

Read

Don't be an Alpha Geek - John Crickett
Just be empathetic and thoughtful about your actions and feedback. This will gradually creep into your all issues and make you a better developer, this is great advice.
Review your own PRs
This is good advice, I do it as a ritual on GitHub, 8 out of 10 times, I get the feedback myself. The editor myth is real, there are things that you don’t notice in your editor, in your environment, in your flow. But as soon as the context changes, the words, and the logic seem to be distant. Believe this advice, this saves a ton of time.
Lessons learned in 35 years of making Software: I have barely lived half of 35 years, the sheer amount of experience in 35 years of software is immense respect. But what is shared here, the words disheartened me that your code will eventually be deleted, will be replaced, will be evolved. This is a harsh reality but we need to accept and move ahead in life.

Watched

Recursion with Boot.Dev:
This has been well explained and visualized as well. The key part in understanding recursion for beginners is visualizing the call stack and going through the code step by step. Must watch for begineers.
Arden Labs Podcast: Guest Samantha Coyle with host Bill Kennedy

This had some good insights and provided some guidance on how to get internships through networking and building the way up the ladder as a software developer.

Rust Command Line Arguemnts by Francesco Cuila:
I watched this on the Live stream on Saturday, was a nice chilling stream with learning a thing or two in Rust.

Learned

Difference between cookies Add and Set in URL Values:
Add: Appends the value to the key without replacing existing values (useful for handling multiple values for a single key).
Set: Replaces the existing value for the key (ensures that only one value is associated with the key).
I learnt this will working with the Meta AI API wrapper in Golang. The API uses payload as a URL encoded body and will append key-value pairs to the request body, the subtle difference can cause nil pointer access if not initialized and used the appropriate method correctly. I think I will write a blog post on this.

Shuffling Two Lists keeping the order of the corresponding index the same:

What I was doing was testing and evaluating some results on data, and that data was coming from a set of files in a folder, I wanted to randomly shuffle those values. I wanted to track the metrics from the data with the filename, so I created this little function that shuffles two or more lists in a random order and maintains a one-on-one index mapping.

import random

# List of file names
file_names = ["file1.txt", "file2.txt", "file3.txt", "file4.txt", "file5.txt"]

# Corresponding sample data for each file
sample_data = ["Data from file 1", "Data from file 2", "Data from file 3", "Data from file 4", "Data from file 5"]

# Create a list of indices
indices = list(range(len(file_names)))

# Shuffle the indices
random.shuffle(indices)

# Reorder both lists using the shuffled indices
shuffled_file_names = [file_names[i] for i in indices]
shuffled_sample_data = [sample_data[i] for i in indices]

print(shuffled_file_names)
print(shuffled_sample_data)

"""
['file3.txt', 'file5.txt', 'file1.txt', 'file2.txt', 'file4.txt']
['Data from file 3', 'Data from file 5', 'Data from file 1', 'Data from file 2', 'Data from file 4']

"""

This is the function, nice simple and modular.

import random


def shuffle_lists(*lists):
    """
    Shuffles two or more lists while keeping the order of corresponding elements the same.
    
    Args:
    *lists: Two or more lists to be shuffled.

    Returns:
    A tuple of shuffled lists with the same order of corresponding elements.
    """
    # Check if all lists have the same length
    if len(set(len(lst) for lst in lists)) != 1:
        raise ValueError("All input lists must have the same length.")

    # Create a list of indices
    indices = list(range(len(lists[0])))

    # Shuffle the indices
    random.shuffle(indices)

    # Reorder all lists using the shuffled indices
    shuffled_lists = tuple([lst[i] for i in indices] for lst in lists)

    return shuffled_lists

LLMs are good at one single thing, Don’t ask too many things in a shot, make it sequential like a pipeline.

Using Tabulate in Python to format a list of dictionaries pretty:

This is really handy to work if you want to quickly visualise dictionaries and list like stuff.

from tabulate import tabulate

# List of books
books = [
    {'Title': '1984', 'Author': 'George Orwell', 'Year': 1949, 'Genre': 'Dystopian'},
    {'Title': 'To Kill a Mockingbird', 'Author': 'Harper Lee', 'Year': 1960, 'Genre': 'Fiction'},
    {'Title': 'The Great Gatsby', 'Author': 'F. Scott Fitzgerald', 'Year': 1925, 'Genre': 'Classic'}
]

# Generate and print the table
print(tabulate(books, headers="keys", tablefmt="grid"))

Output:

+-----------------------+---------------------+--------+-----------+
| Title                 | Author              |   Year | Genre     |
+=======================+=====================+========+===========+
| 1984                  | George Orwell       |   1949 | Dystopian |
+-----------------------+---------------------+--------+-----------+
| To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee          |   1960 | Fiction   |
+-----------------------+---------------------+--------+-----------+
| The Great Gatsby      | F. Scott Fitzgerald |   1925 | Classic   |
+-----------------------+---------------------+--------+-----------+

Tech News

Hashnode Docs: The content engine for API and product documentation.
This brings me in awe with the Hashnode speed and quality of development. The love with which they craft these products is truly commendable, they have the best free tiers for doing almost anything related to writing as a developer.
Artifacts on Antrhropic: Artifacts can be used to create, view, and iterate on platform-specific work directly within Claude.ai.
Buildspace is closing: https://buildspace.so/
In a tragic turn of events, the gradually growing community of builders is sadly shut down.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter https://mailchi.mp/hackernewsletter/714 and for daily developer articles, join daily.dev

That’s it from this week, hope you did well this week, and have a happy week and weekend ahead!

Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week.

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #4

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Techstructive Weekly #4

It was an exhilarating week for me, learned a lot of stuff, wrote a lot of code, pushed a lot of bugs, and tweeted a lot. This week, I wrote a lot of Python scripts at my work for experimentation setup and testing a lot of things, I was learning and prototyping my idea of Audiofy with Appwrite cloud, and read some inspiring articles.

Let’s refresh the developer’s life a bit and think philosophically.

Quote/Thought of the week

"Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence." – Abigail Adams

Not every week is the same, if it is then you are not learning, you are not growing. Stepping outside of the comfort zone is the way to get out of that creative slump. There needs to be hard work and curiosity to drive learning, it won’t come by thinking about how worse the situation is, taking action is the key, if you fail, you learn something.

Read

A Letter to a friend who is thinking of starting something new:
The Sublime
letter to a friend who is thinking of starting something new
Hi hi…
Read more
a year ago · 68 likes · 8 comments · Sari Azout
This blog actually had me think over some of the questions I have by somehow never pondering over more deeply. Because to be honest, I am afraid, those answers will leave me in either fear, guilt, or anxiety. It’s better to answer those and accept them because nothing is perfect in this world.
17 Things you should know about Python Lists to not regret later: As a developer who uses Python at work, I find this extremely helpful, I use most of these almost every day, though some of them also are new to me like list unpacking, not used often much. Some of them are intuitive to use in some cases, which makes Python nice to write.
Go is my hammer and everything seems like a nail: I get that if someone loves to write in a language, it becomes instinct to use it everywhere, but this got me a bit of questioning, like really go for everything? Not sure, like surely could be used, but not necessarily should be used. Would you use Golang to code a frontend application? No right? It’s not meant to be, surely you could write HTML and say I coded a full-stack app in Golang, but really? Been there, done that. Doesn’t feel like touching the code again.
Keeping a daily working journal: I love this idea of journalling daily, I have a prototype of an idea that I made a few weeks back that could be fitted into this domain. Basically an organisation-level blogs for individuals.
Why you should make a New programming language: This blog actually hit me and gave me a hint of my old project of Substack Markdown Parser. So have started to read a couple of blogs and books mentioned in this blog to start understanding interpreters.
Crafting Interpreters: Introduction: As said in the above blog, I am reading this book blog to get some overview of the working of interpreters. I have created a parser for markdown to substack json and vice versa, that is some Python shenanigans. But want to make it a proper parser and interpreter-like tool.
Appwrite: Serverless Function 101 Best Practices: I have been playing with Appwrite’s functions the whole week on the side, it is well documented and this blog added one more silver lining to the rich documentation.

Watched

Appwrite Init Videos:
- Function Local Development:
- CLI Revamped
- Functions:

HTMX CalmCode Crash Course: A really good quick course on HTMX, highly recommend starting here to get a good understanding of why this library exists.
Vim Register and Macros Trick:
This is actually helpful and I knew some of the tricks but being able to get a reminder of that makes me click a few things that I need to change in my daily workflow.
Be a full stack developer with Golang and React: Trolled

Learnt

A list of dictionaries in Python to Pandas Dataframe: This looks quite simple but is really handy and have never thought of it deeply.

import pandas as pd

# List of dictionaries representing bank statement transactions
data = [
    {'Date': '2024-08-01', 'Description': 'Salary Deposit', 'Transaction Type': 'Credit', 'Amount': 3000.00, 'Balance': 3500.00},
    {'Date': '2024-08-03', 'Description': 'Grocery Store Purchase', 'Transaction Type': 'Debit', 'Amount': 150.00, 'Balance': 3350.00},
    {'Date': '2024-08-05', 'Description': 'ATM Withdrawal', 'Transaction Type': 'Debit', 'Amount': 200.00, 'Balance': 3150.00}
]

# Convert the list of dictionaries to a Pandas DataFrame
df = pd.DataFrame(data)

# Display the DataFrame
print(df)

"""
   Date          Description Transaction Type  Amount  Balance
0  2024-08-01       Salary Deposit      Credit  3000.0   3500.0
1  2024-08-03    Grocery Store Purchase Debit   150.0   3350.0
2  2024-08-05        ATM Withdrawal     Debit   200.0   3150.0
"""

Convert a dict with a number as a key and any as a value into a list of ordered numbers with elements as the value of the dict.

# Dictionary with string keys representing numbers and consistent list values
data = {
    "3": [30, 31, 32],
    "1": [10],
    "2": [20, 21]
}

# Convert the dictionary into a list of values, ordered by the numerical interpretation of the keys
ordered_values = [value for key, value in sorted(data.items(), key=lambda x: int(x[0]))]

# Display the ordered list of values
print(ordered_values)

# [ [10], [20, 21], [30, 31, 32] ]

Pip Install a git repo as a python package from a specific branch from the requriements.txt file: I was trying to install the python SDK for Appwrite but the latest release was not live yet, so decided to download the version branch from the GitHub repo. However, that failed as in the Appwrtie function environment, or any cloud/serverless function ecosystem there won’t be git installed.
Appwrite Functions in Python: As I have said, I have been experimenting with the Appwrite function ecosystem throughout the week on the side. I was basically trying to use Python functions for some prototyping ideas. I must say the documentation is really good. I learnt how to parse binary data into a response, a structure for a sample Python function, and set an appwrite json locally for functions.
Table extraction from Images using GPT-4 Vision and Python: This is something I have been researching at my work and found it interesting to read and experiment upon. I am amazed at how beautifully LLMs can parse and get back data.

Tech News

Appwrite Init: It was a great week with a ton of launches and great features. i was really looking for Golang support and it is really a game changer for the developer experience of quickly making a backend with great control.
Redis 8 and AI capabilities: Redis since it changed its license, gets the biggest release ever. As any other thing launching in 2024 has the word AI in it.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter https://mailchi.mp/hackernewsletter/713

That’s it from this week, I hope you did well this week, and have a happy week and weekend ahead!

Follow me on Twitter/X for more of my thoughts and tech stuff.

Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week.

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #3

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Techstructive Weekly #3

The week was really tiring for me for some reasons, was not able to work on the side projects. I actually spent some time with my family and cousin who came over the weeks for festivals. However, on the work side of things, I was able to learn a few things about NGINX, pdf parsing and product specific features.

The upcoming week(end) will be actually fun, as I finally have some free time to write some blogs, hopefully will be able to have some things to showcase and share next week about the things I explored or failed at those things.

Quote of the week

"The secret to satisfaction is to find meaning in the journey, not just the destination."
- Unknown

Satisfaction is important in life, you need to understand the difference between your needs and wants. You absolutely have to give your best to satisfy your needs, but don't go too hard on your wants, understand your intentions and the feelings of others as well. Don't get too greedy on reaching the top, its should be about the process, about the art, about the journey, embrace it and focus on that instead.

Read

A Pragmatic Workflow for Technical Writing:
This article actually gave me the clarity to start my writing journey again, I seem to have lost touch with writing articles over the last few months, need to get back to the old routine of 1 week 1 article.

Mostly Harmless Ideas

A Pragmatic Workflow for Technical Writing

a year ago · 16 likes · 6 comments · Alejandro Piad Morffis

20 years of blogging: https://jeena.net/20-years-blogging
This shows how one must approach blogging as a developer, just be selfish, write for yourself first, if it helps others, that is the bonus and the reward for you. Don't make your expectations too high, the rewards come over time, make a routine, just dump your thoughts if feeling a bit overwhelmed, it will help.

Watched

NGINX Tutorial

This gave me a good refresher and a bit more concise explanation of most of the capabilities of NGINX, I am running the Nginx Survival guide blog series, which I will explain the most needed and common uses of NGINX.
RabitMQ from Boot.dev:

The video demonstrates the basic architecture for the usage of RabbitMQ for developers. If you are new to message brokers and want to learn about backend systems, I highly recommend watching the clips of boot.dev.
Problem with Tutorials: https://youtube.com/shorts/ZFi-LTpUGHA?si=qt2i80-68I9CwABB
I can relate as a technical writer, how much stuff is lost while writing the blog. So many examples discarded, so many attempts hidden, so many words deleted. The final guide/tutorial looks so perfect that it might overwhelm the reader/listener that how is it possible to get everything right in the first place, in reality it is a result of failed attempts and trail and error.
Tweet from Bill Kennedy about mindset of developers after the advent of AI assistants: https://x.com/goinggodotnet/status/1822298432813375760
Really, this hit me hard, as a developer, we need to focus on solving architectures and problems and not limit ourselves in minor code fixes and feature implementations.

Learnt

If you want to quickly get a JSON response from a locally running API, never use subprocess.run in python, this actually encodes the json response in a way that becomes almost impossible to get back, especially if the json response structure is a bit complicated. I was a bit in a hurry and lazy, so just prompted GPT to get me a script to call the api and store the response in a json file, but what happened was while returning the response from the stdout, the json string was encoded, and it became a mess to decode back. Always use requests or the native libraries in python. Do not rely on stdout responses, as it could be very different the way shells might interpret data from your native applications.
There is no apparent way of restoring files of VS Code file explorer after deleting, like yeah CTRL + Z would work if you just deleted. But after a day, I realized I needed the files back, I tried to into `/tmp` folder, there were files I deleted earlier this week, but not from VS Code apparently. Really a bummer. Let me know if you know the place where VS Code stores deleted files, if it does.

Tech News

Golang 1.23 released this week: https://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.23
This looks like a big release with some alternate approaches getting added to the language, which are kind of double edged swords from most of the professionals opinion I noticed.
X releases Grok AI 2: https://x.ai/blog/grok-2
This actually caused some trend on twitter (ok X) of floods of images generated by Grok AI.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter:

https://mailchi.mp/hackernewsletter/712

That’s it from this week, I hope you did well this week, and have a happy week and weekend ahead!

Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week.

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #2

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Week #2

This week I made some mistakes at my job (well they were the week before) but they got caught after the review. I learned how powerful reviews could be at catching flaws in code. I also caught a bug while pair programming, it was a mixed feeling as a developer for me this week.

In the end, I would recommend debugging your code thrice, yes not once, not twice but thrice, and also make sure to forcefully make the code flow reach the section of your changes, if that is a bit of an edge case thing.

On the side, I have been playing with the Meta AI API (not the official API) to use it anonymously without logging in using Golang.

Quote of the week

“We all make mistakes, but it's how we come back from the mistakes that matters.”
- Unknown

As I said, I made mistakes, but those were guiding principles and learning experiences to grow with. You can cry and give reasons, or accept your mistake and improve. Choose the latter, it will help you grow.

Read

How broken is hiring in 2024?
Being a fresher in 2024, I have experienced it quite closely from the glimpse of the beginning of this phase after Q3 in 2023, where I applied almost 100 applications without a single interview—finally landed an interview and working in that company today. What a ride it has been, 100+ applications, 1 interview to crack the job, skills issues? maybe but I think it could be timing issues.
How Canva Saved $ 3M manually in Amazon S3 Costs with Glacier Instant Retrieval
This is quite a smart solution, I would call, it the right tool for the right job, backed by data. They rightly used the right analytical metric to solve their problem.
How to build Extremely quickly
Outlining is important in making anything, it gives me the boost to complete the unfinished project, as well as the momentum to carry on after a break or the next day.

Watched

Git Cherry Pick
I haven’t actually used this feature of git, but in my previous internship was used by my seniors while making hotfixes in releases. Now I got what actually it was.
Git Merge
Backend Banter (Lane Wagner) with Lawrence Lockhart
This is quite a good listen, it elaborates on juniors trying to land their first job, how you should network, and how different is learning for everyone. Must watch for beginners and freshers to be placed in a good mindset for the future as well as be helpful to your future junior colleagues.

Learnt

Structuring a function call output in an Open AI API Call: I Learnt a few things like adding a structured output to a function call in an Open AI API call.

Reading and Writing a PDF file with pikepdf (useful for splitting and manipulating files)

import pikepdf
from pathlib import Path

def split_pdf(input_pdf_path, output_dir):
    pdf = pikepdf.Pdf.open(input_pdf_path)
    output_dir = Path(output_dir)
    output_dir.mkdir(exist_ok=True)
    
    for i, page in enumerate(pdf.pages):
        output_pdf_path = output_dir / f'page_{i+1}.pdf'
        with pikepdf.Pdf.new() as output_pdf:
            output_pdf.pages.append(page)
            output_pdf.save(output_pdf_path)

LLMs are taking over. I mean not quality-wise, but they seem to be everywhere, almost every company is trying to use AI Agents to make their business look smart (but is not actually). This is a harsh or soft truth that I have to accept and move ahead to leverage in things I would do and build.

Tech News

Structured Response from Function Calls in Open AI API Calls
Appwrite Init: Some special releases from the Appwrite Team in the upcoming weeks. Make sure to grab your ticket. Golang's support for cloud functions is confirmed!
Google LLM Gemini API Cost Cut by around 70%

Follow HackerNewsletter for more updates

That’s it from this week, I hope you did well this week, and have a happy week and weekend ahead!

Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week.

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #1

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 UTC

Week #1

This week, I had a ton of fun on the side as I finally made the MVP of a side project. An SSG with a Content Management System-like interface. an SSG with an editor that syncs up the posts from a database.

In this process, I learned about Cloudflare workers and golang. At work, I had some thinking and experimentation with LLMs.

Quote of the Week

"The only limit to our realization of tomorrow is our doubts of today."
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

The LLM thing is affecting the mindset of people, more of which people think that it is going to replace humans, but really? Can a computer program that computes some numbers based on some other numbers even compare to human thoughts? That’s way far from what you are capable of, don’t waste the energy in thinking this.

Wrote

Well, I didn’t write any articles this week, I am in the research phase for writing the Golang Patch Method, which is an interesting topic. It has way more things than I expected to be. This is what I love about writing articles/blogs; it helps me learn concepts in such detail.

Hopefully, next week, there will be an article to share in this newsletter.

Read

Pandas’ Dataframe is Column Major Data Structures

Daily Dose of Data Science

What Happens When You Append Rows to a Pandas DataFrame

Daily Dose of Data Science Free Book | Deep Dives…

a year ago · 24 likes · 4 comments · Avi Chawla

Deno and HTTP imports: Article
Pixel by Pixel, could create a vault of articles: Pauline’s Blog
Row Scanning in Golang with reflect package: Stackoverflow Question

Watched

Cloudflare Workers 101: A Crash Course on Cloudflare Workers
Git Log
How good are LLM? Think about it

Learnt

Cloudflare Workers Setup: Documentation
It has good examples of some standard use cases and applications.
Getting table data using pymupdf: Article
Getting some table position information of tables present in a pdf document. It can be really useful for the extraction of table-related data. For instance, I could get the width and height of the table to further use it in extraction techniques.
HTTP Patch method is not what you think it is: Article
I am also surprised that the PATCH method is different from than rest of the methods, we actually need to send commands/instructions to the server in order to make it understand what and how to update the resource-specific fields or entities.

Setting a Github Pages on GitHub Actions Workflow:
I used this snippet in my Tuxo SSG, which would serve as the output directory of the generated SSG files to GitHub Pages.

    - name: GitHub Pages
      uses: crazy-max/ghaction-github-pages@v3
      with:
        target_branch: output-branch
        build_dir: my_app/
        jekyll: false
      env:
        GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Tech News

FastHTML: A Python framework for developing web applications. I would like to explore this in the upcoming weeks.
AI Studio: Create fictional AI characters to chat with by Meta. This is pretty good use case for authors and fantasy writers. It could allow them to get to know their characters in a better way.

As always, I recommend going through the HackerNews Newsletter to get all the tech news.

That’s it from this week, hope you did well this week, and have a happy week and weekend ahead!

Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week.

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #0

Sat, 27 Jul 2024 00:00:00 UTC

## Week #0 This week was about writing one of the much-procrastinated blog posts, starting a YouTube channel, and going through some heavy debugging sessions with my colleagues at work. ### Quote of the week > It’s harder to say things which are easier to do, and easier to say things which are harder to do > (It’s just my random thought converted to a quote) Seriously think about this quote, it is easier to say I will go to the gym daily, and read books, but working on them is it hard. Why is the harder to say that I am scrolling through Twitter, and Instagram, having burnout, but taking action against it is sheer a change in mindset? Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. ## Wrote * [**Nginx Creating Web Applications**](https://www.meetgor.com/nginx-02-web-servers/) - Part 2 of my Nginx Survival Guide I finally wrote my second post in the Nginx Survival guide, after procrastinating for a couple of months, this weekend, I’ll be writing a post on the Golang series. So, keep an eye out for that. ## Read 1. [**I am Tired of AI content**](https://dev.to/syeo66/im-tired-of-it-5fe2): It is tiring to read AI-generated content spam on most of the blogging/social media platforms. Please, guys, write genuinely value-adding (authentic) content for yourself at least, don’t try to shine in the eyes of others, it would do more harm than good. 2. [**StackOverflow Developer Survey 2024**](https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/): This was important to reflect on the state of developers in 2024, especially after the wild layoff and AI-hype phase. Also one of the things I noticed was that remote and hybrid companies are still covering around 80% of the jobs, which is a good number, to be honest. 3. [Saiyam Pathak’s 2021 Year reflection](https://saiyampathak.medium.com/2021-year-i-want-and-do-not-want-to-remember-4229c4a32015): There is always a year in someone’s life that they don’t want to remember, it is hard to lose someone very close to you. May life never cross such paths. But Saiyam Pathak’s journey is an inspiration to take from, he is an ambassador in CNCF, founder of Kubesimplify, and an online educator and mentor. What a journey, what a man. ## Watched 1. **SQLite CTEs**: A recursive CTE in SQLite is a handy way to run repeated queries to build up results step-by-step, like creating a sequence of numbers or working with hierarchical data. You start with a base query, then keep adding to it until you get the full set of results. It’s a neat trick for straightforwardly managing complex data patterns. 2. **Git Fork Vs Clone**: This video is more than explaining Fork vs Clone, obliviously I know the difference between them but Primeagen goes beyond that and explains the workflow for contributing to an open-source project, and trying to matter more than merging :) Also, I can relate how much the importance of viewing the changes on GitHub before creating the PR is, have been there and I do it all the time, had saved me a lot of time from colleagues’ reviews. ## Learnt * **Google Cloud Run Min and Max Instances**: We can define certain number of containers to run at minimum or maximum. The minimum number prevents the time wasted on cold start if the service is inactive for long, and maximum number would allow us to scale the number of incoming requests(it largely depends on the implementation as well). GCP Cloud Run [Minimum](https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/configuring/min-instances) and [Maximum](https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/configuring/max-instances) Instances Config. * [Python Itertools Product](https://docs.python.org/3/library/itertools.html#itertools.product): Imagine you're tasked with exploring every possible outcome of a scenario where each decision can be either negative, neutral, or positive. To systematically tackle this, Python’s `itertools.product` is handy. By setting up `itertools.product([-1, 0, 1], repeat=n)`, that generates every combination of these choices, repeated `n` times. For instance, if `n` were 2, output (-1, -1), (-1, 0), (0, 1), and so forth—every pairing of -1s, 0s, and 1s. This method spares you from manually scripting nested loops, ensuring clarity and efficiency in your code. To further inject the output of this in the python code, cast the itertool object to list as `list(itertools.product([-1, 0, 1], repeat=n)).` * Becoming a Never Nester: I kind of start with simple if-else but end up with nested if else conditions, I don’t know I am just hacking around, making the solution work. That’s the first phase right of make it work, make it correct, make it fast. Sometimes, after making it work, out of excitement I forget to make it readable and correct, which might lead to bad code down the line. So, I need to learn to make a habit to resist using nested if-else(or any nested code) at the first place. ## Tech News * [Meta released its updated LLM Model](https://ai.meta.com/blog/meta-llama-3-1/): Llama 3.1, It’s a 405B model, offering support for 128K context length and multiple languages. That is a big number but not sure if it is a big shift in the quality of the LLMs these days, the trend is moving a bit slowly now. Possibly a cap before something improves the results. * [OpenAI to launch AI search](https://chatgpt.com/search): So there is finally a worthy rival to Google search it seems, but can’t comment till we see the results. * [Mistral Large 2](https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large-2407): It has 123 billion parameters, improved code generation, multilingual support, and better reasoning. It features a 128k context window and supports numerous languages and coding languages. For more updates, I follow [hackernews](https://mailchi.mp/hackernewsletter/567). That’s it from this week, hope you did well this week, and have a happy week and weekend ahead! Thank you for reading, let’s catch up in the next week. Happy Coding :) Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.