Zikani's Blog
In this article I will show you how to setup a minimal test using testcontainers-go. We are going to extend some ideas from my last article on generating fake data to to insert random data into the te
Sometimes, you may need to generate fake data for use for testing behavior of your systems or for load or volume testing, for example to test that pagination behavior works well with hundreds or hundr
In this article I go over how I implemented a Spring Boot API for Spam Detection using an advanced anti-spam model from the Hugging Face onnx-community and Microsoft’s ONNX Runtime for Java. We will package the API up as a Docker image which we can r...
I am working on a browser automation thingy and want to try supporting LightPanda as I am interested in seeing if it may be a good lightweight alternative to Chromium for CI (Continuous Integration) tests. Komaso (that’s Chichewa, you can read it as ...
Whenever you work on anything, it's typically to address a present or future need or activity. As much as that is the case, most tasks that people work on were defined or specified in the past. Thinki
In this article we will see how to leverage Postgres support for pipelining queries which “allows applications to send a query without having to read the result of the previously sent query”. This allows you for example to perform batch updates which...
In this article, we will look at how to use a tool I built named git-monorepo to merge existing Git repositories into a monorepo while maintaining the complete history from each repository. This can be useful if you want to reduce repository-sprawl a...
Embeddings or Vector Embeddings are the numeric representation of text or other data that enables a lot of Machine learning tasks like classification and clustering. If you are familiar with the concept of embeddings or have some interest in machine ...
One observation I have made working with fellow developers, especially those with less experience or just getting started is the lack of confidence to make educated/informed guesses about things. I encourage junior developers I work with to learn how...
I am working on a personal CRM/Note taking app and wanted to show my friends how it works to get some feedback and ideas from them, just in case I consider making it more widely accessible tool or maybe even Open Source. As I was thinking about how t...
In this article, we will see how to store a Go object (struct) as as encrypted data in a database. We will assume Postgres for this article, but the technique should work with other databases as well. To show the versatility of the technique, we will...
In this article we will see how to implement a micro-service to calculate administrative fees. We will use the concept of cash out fees for a fictional mobile money service operator, using Go armed with only the standard library for the HTTP server a...
When I first heard the expression, “Don’t treat servers as Pets, treat them more like Cattle” it immediately made sense to me, based on what I knew about the value of Cattle and Pets, then I heard the real explanation that made me pause … and chuckle...
This article is written in Chichewa. I wanted to try something different. Here goes nothing Mawu oti venda nthawi zambiri amatikumbutsa anyamata ndi amayi a mtawuni kapena kumsika omwe amagulitsa zinthu zosiyanasiyana monga nsapato, katundu wa magets...
Modern day developers are no strangers to automatically generated project names, these have become common and you may run into them if you use for example: Vercel for deploying projects Fly.io Docker (Desktop) ... and many other modern tools that...
This article was authored at the kitchen sink. As a young Malawian bachelor (some rude people would say senior bachelor), I often find myself at the kitchen sink doing dishes. Not only because it's the one skill I am confident at in the kitchen when ...
In this quick-n-dirty article, we will see how to generate a PDF from a user-submitted markdown with Go. We will build a simple service using the standard library's net/http for the backend and EasyMDE, a browser editor, for handling markdown on the ...
If you have used Hibernate before you know that you can specify that an Entity class should have it's @Id fields set via @GeneratedValue - typically you use either a sequence or identity strategy to automatically generate, say, auto-incrementing inte...
In this article, we will look at some cool, practical query tricks you can use in projects that use PostgreSQL as the DBMS: Order results but select a specific first-row This trick allows you to write a query with an order-by clause which allows you ...
Damn, this one bit me very recently. So imagine you have a Java API and because of whatever reasons you agreed that the JSON properties for the requests should be in snake_case_form. Cool, cool, that just wants a simple Jackson @JsonProperty annotati...