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Introducing Pome

Thu, 31 Dec 2015 00:00:00 -0800

I'm excited to announce that I just released the first version of Pome (version 0.1.0). Pome stands for PostgreSQL Metrics. Pome is a PostgreSQL Metrics Dashboard to keep track of the health of your database.

Introducing Suma

Wed, 30 Dec 2015 00:00:00 -0800

I'm excited to announce the release of the first version of Suma. Suma stands for Short URL Managment App. The role of Suma to manage external links and extract data from them. Suma is a small web service to do easily the followings:

Introduction to PostgreSQL physical storage

Mon, 09 Nov 2015 00:00:00 -0800

I initially wrote this post for myself, I wanted to understand enough about the underlying physical storage to be able to grasp other concepts which can affect your database. This post is probably more aimed to people with similar interests, I will try to keep it accurate but the aim is to make it simpler to understand so I may overlook some details.

Embedding static assets in a Go project

Mon, 07 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0700

I wanted to build a small self-contained web application in Go, at the opposite of a usual webapp where the assets will be served separately via a CDN or HTTP server like Nginx. But if performance doesn't matter or it's aimed for a small traffic then having a self-contained application makes it easier to deploy and to distribute as it's simply a binary to run.

Recursive Regular Expression

Thu, 20 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0700

I was discussing with a colleague about a simple problem that his company was asking during an interview: "Given a string composed from opened and closed parentheses, detect if all the parentheses are closed"

Capturing screenshots of website with Python

Wed, 19 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0700

If you google how to do a screenshot of a website then you will probably end with an answer depending on PyQT and WebKit. Sadly, PyQt is not a python package that you can install easily via pip and you will few others dependencies to be able to generate a screenshot of a site.

Prefetch ID with SQLAlchemy and PosgreSQL

Tue, 18 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0700

I wanted to store external URL of project as short link (a bit like bitly) so a harmful URL could be block globally in the system. To avoid making the URL being able to be guessed, I used hashids which generates short, unique, non-sequential ids from numbers. With hashids I can easily convert the primary key id into an alternative id which can be exposed.

Handling concurrent INSERT with SQLAlchemy

Mon, 17 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0700

In some cases, you may want to have a unique column other than a primary key id. E.g: email, passport number, national id, vat number, ...
If you have some unique constraints on a table then you may hit some race condition problem in some edge cases. In this post, we will only cover this case base on Postgres, but I assume that the behavior is similar with other RDBMS: Mysql, Oracle, ...

Postgres full-text search is Good Enough!

Mon, 13 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0700

When you have to build a web application, you are often asked to add search. The magnifying glass is something that we now add to wireframes without even knowing what we are going to search.

Virtualenvwrapper plugins for gems and npms

Fri, 10 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0700

In a previous post, we've seen how to modify your activate script to keep inside a virtualenv the packages from Node and Ruby called gems and npms. I find useful to be able to try gems or npms inside a virtualenv without contaminate your setup.