Generic blog of a generic software engineer
I’ve spent the last few months building a conversational agent focused on improving discovery and reducing the support burden. I know what you’re thinking… another chatbot is exactly what the world needed. You’re welcome. In any case, it has been fun operating at the cutting edge of this AI summer , though development has been a rollercoaster, with traditional software engineering and all its…
We recently upgraded from a RAG workflow to a fully agentic system. We saw significant gains in quality, but unfortunately there is no such thing as a free lunch and our median response time dropped from 3.5s to 14s. This degradation came from tool usage and a model swap from Gemini Flash 2.0 to Claude Sonnet 4 (slower but significantly stronger agentic capabilities). The response time was deemed…
I recently audited our estate and noticed many inconsistencies in how we make service calls. Who knew there could be such variation for a commonplace task? Some pitfalls include... No Logging No Metrics No Retry Strategy No Response Validation Inconsistent Error Handling No Correlation ID Propagation No Logging In particular, pre-request and post-response logging. Many times I have been debugging…
I started retrospectively tracking my time at work near the end of last year. In this time audit , I categorise my time into several buckets (e.g., sprint work, meetings, learning) and conduct a review at the end of the week. The process is intentionally low tech with no fancy tracking app, just manual entries into my calendar. Granularity is low — only to the nearest half-hour — since I assume…
I’ve been working on slimming down my social media diet for a while, mainly for productivity reasons rather than for privacy concerns. Snapchat was the last man standing, as my partner insisted on using it to share photos when we're apart. I brokered a deal with her: if I made us a replacement, I could uninstall Snapchat. After 24 hours of coding (thanks WakaTime ), Looking Glass was born. We have…
80% of people fail their New Year's resolutions in the first month . One of the main reasons for this is setting the wrong type of goals. The worst goals are vague and lack clear success criteria, like "read more" or "drink less". SMART goals, such as "read 1 book every month", are an improvement but we can still do better. We need to focus on systems over goals . For instance, how about…
I stumbled across Artem Krylysov's Let's Build a Full-Text Search Engine and thought it would be fun to take the project a step further. This post is an unofficial part 2, where we implement relevance ranking functions such as TF–IDF and BM25. I started with rough feature parity for the search engine, opting for Python instead of Go. I'm using a different Wikipedia dump (2023-12-27) and…
I have rebuilt my personal site, again. Iteration #1 was a static Bootstrap v4 site that served me well for 3 years. It had a gimmicky 3D head rendered with Three.js that followed the cursor. Somehow, this site helped me land my first job out of university. Iteration #2 was a redesign using Svelte v3 — because a fully-fledged JS framework is obviously needed for a small personal site. The gimmick…