This is my personal blog about computer science, technology and my life.
Here is the 2026 version of my travel back to China blog. In the last blog of the series, I said I would try my best to continue it. While this year’s blog is a little bit late (we already passed mid-year of 2026!), it’s still better than nothing. If I can give myself an excuse, I’ve been busy since I came back, with both work and my side project. It doesn’t help that we went back later than…
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. – Isaac Newton
Here we are. The year of 2026!
I did some music video generation experiments in November. Though lots of people are doing similar things nowadays and I’m not really doing anything unique, I got lots of joy and was kind of addicted to it for a few weeks. So I thought I’d record the experiments just to complete the missing piece of my blog posts in 2025, before I write the year end review blog.
I moved to a new place recently. Using this as an opportunity, I re-configured the whole home network which I wanted to do long time ago. I put lots of thoughts into it. Even though I’m a software engineer for many years, I rarely touched the network layers below L3. So when researching and setting it up, I learned a lot on the way. This article shares the journey and the final setup I have.
Update 2025-12-20: add section about using local repo.
In the last blog post, I talked about my first Rust project. Recently, I finished another Rust CLI project called rhyme-checker that I wanted to build a long time ago. I tried it as a Claude Skill and got really good results. I also built a project clap-web-gen to convert it (and be able to convert many other Rust CLI projects) to a web page running in the browser without any backend. This blog…
Less Active Scala Community
Seesaw is a learning experience platform for elementary education. My daughter’s daycare uses it for communication with us. They also took pictures of her and send them through Seesaw every day. When my daughter transfers to a new daycare, I want to download all the photos before my account is deactivated. However, with its message history download tool, it can only download the messages as a PDF,…
Since LLMs started to get popular, I find one of their strengths is to review things like code and writings. The strength is related to its weakness: it can hallucinate and just make up things but sound confident. However, when it reviews your own writings, you know the subject best, so if the LLMs are making up things, you’ll catch that. After trying Claude Code at work, I found it useful and…
There are some battle-tested consensus algorithms like Paxos and Raft to ensure a consistent view will be reached in a distributed system, even with scenarios like node failure, network partition, clock skew, and so on. There are existing systems like etcd and Zookeeper that implement these algorithms so you can use them as external systems. But sometimes, you may need to embed the algorithm into…
In my blog, I have a page called Read to keep the books I’ve read. At first, I used an API from Douban (a Chinese social media that has reviews and metadata of books, movies, TV shows). I was really happy about it since it’s easy to find and add books into a list on Douban, while still being able to render them in a custom layout. But a few years ago (cannot remember the exact time), the API…
Module Context Protocol (MCP) is adopted by more and more people as a way to integrate tools to LLMs easily. However, I find it unintuitive and unnecessarily complex. So in this article, I’ll explore how to use existing OpenAPI servers as tools of LLMs instead of writing the functions in a completely new protocol. This can potentially become a simpler standard that only needs implementing an…
As I mentioned in the last year-end retrospective blog, I traveled back to China again this year (to be more accurate, at the end of 2024). I migrated to Canada just before Covid, which is why I only started to go back since last year after the Covid measures were all lifted. I think it’s worth a blog post every time I go back there since China, as a country I spent most of my life, not only made…
In my previous blogs [1][2], I’ve introduced my high availability cluster setup. It works really well: when 1 of the 3 nodes is down, the service either continues to be online, or can be recovered rather quickly (in the case I set service replica to 1 to avoid wasting the resource). However, in the beginning of this year, one node went down not because of regular updates or temporary shutdown for…
Here is another new year! I didn’t write any retrospective for 2023, so I’d like to combine it with 2024 together in this one since 2023 is a very important year for me. I planned to write it after I came back from China’s travel but never got the time. When I finally got the time it was already too late to write a year-end review. I’m staying in China again now (when I first started this article…
Note: code used in this article can be found on the Github repo jepsen-postgres-ha.
Even when writing a website using something other than Javascript to render content from the server, sometimes it’s inevitable to have some Javascript or CSS code. So managing Javascript dependencies and build packages is needed. The easiest way may be to just not use any tool: download all the dependency files into a directory and import them in the html file directly. That’s what I was doing for…
As a long time Linux and KDE user, I’m pretty uncomfortable with the workflow of MacOS even though I have used MacOS fairly long as well. A lot of companies don’t support Linux to be used on the development laptop. Even for some companies that do support Linux, the hardware for Linux is usually far worse than Macbooks. So MacOS is often the best or even the only choice for work. This is still the…
This article is also posted at RSS Brain blog.