I made this bench; I’m proud of it
June 02, 2025 | (Last Update : June 02, 2025)
woodworking diy craftsmanship
I built a bench, and I’m proud of it! I modified a design that I had previously used for a coffee table and got the wood from a local lumbermill in my town. Check it out!
Read more...Postgres Lock Queues, Migrations, and Timeouts
April 19, 2024 | (Last Update : April 19, 2024)
postgres
When Postgres operations obtain table-level locks, subsequent operations wait in a queue, but if there are any lock contentions in that queue, long-running queries have the potential to back everything up and can sometimes take down entire applications!
Read more...ActiveRecord take vs first
April 08, 2024 | (Last Update : April 08, 2024)
ruby postgres rails active-record
ActiveRecord has a method called take that returns a single record similar to first, except take doesn’t order the records before selecting one. This can GREATLY increase performance in some circumstances; the latency graph above shows a real-life example of take significantly reducing the duration of an api call by changing a single first to take.
Numbered Block Params In Ruby
February 28, 2024 | (Last Update : February 28, 2024)
ruby
Ruby 2.7 added some syntax sugar that has been making my life easier at work; no longer do I need to use a as my “placeholder” variable in enumerators, instead, we have a built in “numbered” block parameter!
Postgres Enums: Don’t Use ‘Em
April 22, 2022 | (Last Update : April 22, 2022)
postgres enums database
While Postgres offers an ENUM type, the general recommendation is NOT to use it, here I discuss why and give an alterative solution that I prefer: creating a new table and referencing foreign keys
Read more...Ambush!
January 11, 2022 | (Last Update : January 11, 2022)
wargame boardgames reviews
Ambush! is a solo WW2 strategy game where you command a squad of US soldiers through 8 different missions which you can link together into a longer campaign. Each mission has different victory conditions and mission-specific rules that change the behavior of the map, limit the equipment you can bring or variations keeping the scenario unique and interesting.
Read more...Using NOT in Postgres CHECK constraints
April 16, 2021 | (Last Update : April 16, 2021)
postgres
For some reason I could not find good information on this (maybe because it’s obvious). But you can add NOT into your Postgres CHECK CONSTRAINTs; this is particularly useful when you find a nice succinct way to express the negation of the constraint you want.
Ruby’s Partition Method: It Does What You Think.
October 03, 2020 | (Last Update : October 03, 2020)
ruby
Ruby has a neat function in Enumerable called partition that can split the values in the enumerable into two partitions based arbitrary logic.
Cancelling PostgreSQL Queries When HTTP Request Times Out
August 04, 2020 | (Last Update : August 04, 2020)
postgres rails active-record
During a recent effort at work to optimize database performance we found a bunch of queries which our Rails application triggered but, since the query took longer than our configured HTTP timeout, the transaction was later abandoned. We had initially thought that PgBouncer might have a setting to cancel queries after a request times-out, but that doesn’t seem to be a feature that PgBouncer Currently supports.
We want to cancel these queries to free-up database resources, especially in case we have db bottlenecks.
Read more...ufw - Linux Firewall And How To Use It
July 24, 2020 | (Last Update : August 02, 2020)
do-k8s-node ubuntu linux k8s Heroku digital-ocean
08-02-2020: Updated with how I setup UFW on my home server
I’ve been tinkering a bit with Digital Ocean (use my referral link to get $100 in Digital Ocean credit) and I’ve decided to move a small personal project from Heroku to a droplet running a small Kubernetes (k8s) cluster. I want to do this both to learn about setting up k8s (very useful since I work with it daily) and because Digital Ocean is cheaper than Heroku for my use-case.
This will be the first post in a series about setting up this single-node k8s cluster on a Digital Ocean droplet; check out the do-k8s-node tag to find the other posts in this series; I’ll also be adding links to the next post in the series as I write them.
This first post is about the firewall built into Ubuntu: ufw as well as why I want to move from Heroku to Digital Ocean.