Recent content on Evgenii Pendragon
Like many other engineers in the field I have started using Claude Code to be more familiar with the tech and to keep up with the trends. I have used Claude Code in several personal projects at this point. The more I used Claude Code, the more I noticed that both my ability to write code by hand started to get rusty. Throughout my time working in those projects I have noticed that it became…
I have been skeptical about the capabilities of AI. I feel that I have always been more willing to jump on the side of pointing out the limitations and insufficiencies of large language models, rather than to celebrate and praise all of its impressive features. While I would like to continue looking at all and any tools with a sober look, weighing pros against cons, and argue once I have a…
Building foundational security in software development starts with evaluating the languages that are used for building it. Many languages used in the past and today do not have the safety features required to prevent a whole class of vulnerabilities from happening. By adopting safer alternatives, we can be more confident in the security and safety of the resulting software. Examples from the past…
I started using Claude Code recently. Working with it led me to read the manuals and best practices straight from the horse’s mouth - Anthropic’s docs themselves. As I was perusing the articles talking about different features and capabilities, and best ways to use it, I stumbled upon a section in Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding , which states: b. Use Claude as a linter…
After working in financial industry for a while you kind of become desensitised to lots of financial concepts or terminology. I realized it when I learned about a Luhn Algorithm or Luhn Check. This algorithm is a very basic checksum algorithm that works every time we input our credit or debit card numbers. In addition to that, it turns out that a wide variety of other businesses and industries…
In my career I worked with plenty of different software that require the presence of certain environment variables for them to function properly. From time to time I would notice that the program either offers it as an option or requires you to have XDG_... type variable be set in your environment. I never looked too deeply into it, however I understood that it provided base paths for the…
In an attempt to use Go in the context of AWS, I wanted to see how Go would work with AWS Lambda. I decided to create a small project where the function would take an image and convert it to an ASCII art. Using Go for serverless functions Using Go for serverless functions makes a lot of sense. Speed of execution keeps the costs down and delivers the results quickly. When you are getting charged by…
Recently, I was working on customizing my tmux . I have made quite a few changes to the .tmux.conf file. In addition to that I have been making updates to my .zshrc and config.conf (Neofetch) files. I was trying out tmux on my other machine and I wanted to use the same setup there. That made me think up an idea of setting up one GitHub repository that would host all of my essential configuration…
I have been exploring some new tools here and there. When I started watching Primeagen , I took a note of several tools that he was using and advocating for. One of them was tmux. What is tmux? tmux is a terminal multiplexer. What that means is you can have many terminals in one. According to tmux wiki: tmux is a program which runs in a terminal and allows multiple other terminal programs to be…
I wanted to learn more about blockchain and how it works for a while now. Like many others, I have heard plenty about the applications of blockchain from cryptocurrency to NFT to healthcare ledgers. In this post, we will explore a simple blockchain application which will showcase one the main features of blockchain - the chaining itself. This application builds a chain of blocks that contain some…
Recently, I wrote an article about my journey in learning about robots.txt and its implications on the data rights in regards to what I write in my blog. I was confident that I wanted to ban all the crawlers from my website. Turned out there was an unintended consequence that I did not account for. My LinkedIn posts became broken Ever since I changed my robots.txt file, I started seeing that my…
EDIT: In my follow-up article I explore the new things that I have learnt about the Open Graph Protocol and robots.txt restrictions that ended up making LinkedIn unable to render the previews for the links that I would post. It expands on the things mentioned here. I ended up changing my mind on a total disallowing of access for bots. Here is the article link: I was wrong about robots.txt Some of…
What is MidWord.com? MidWord.com is a game where you guess a word from a dictionary developed by Mina Naguib . Whenever you make a guess, the program tells you if your guess is before or after the secret word. After many attempts you narrow it down to find the word that is hidden. During the process you get to see the suffix that has been identified in your guesses, which helps keeping you on…
I have been working in the software industry for about 8 years now. One of the problems that has always existed and been a point of contention in the dev teams is the presence of good documentation. Why is that? There are a couple of reasons. One, good and relevant documentation is an ongoing maintenance effort. There aren’t too many people who are excited to maintain the documentation. Even…
Replaced by AI? Like many other people in the industry, I became wary of the news that AI was going to replace us started circulating in software professionals’ circles. By the time when people started fear-mongering and promising that in 6 months there will be no need in human developers, AI has already been around for a while. However it made a couple of significant leaps in features and…
Hello, there! 👋 Creating content I decided to start a blog to write on topics that are interesting to me or something that I would like to explore. The topics in this blog should cover tech, software development, cybersecurity, AI, business, recent news, and occasional book reviews. Hopefully the learnings that will be discovered in this blog will be useful to many more people. Building a brand…