Recent content on Parikshit Agnihotry

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 Plausible diffs are where expensive mistakes hide. 
 Over the last few months, I’ve been running a product stack end-to-end myself, with no review queue to hide behind when an AI hand-waves a gnarly edge case. For a while, my workflow was the default one: I’d describe a task to Claude, it would write the code, I’d…

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 Extracting deals from emails sounds straightforward until you attempt it at scale. It quickly becomes a deceptively hard NLP problem: unstructured text, image-only creatives, ambiguous marketing language, and no standardized format. 
 Solving it required multiple architectural shifts. What started as prompt-heavy extraction ultimately…

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 Apart from the interview questions, there are a lot of factors to consider while interviewing software engineers. In this write-up, I try to summarize the concepts that I have learned in the past 12 years of hiring software engineers across domains, teams, and levels. 
 The goal of this write-up is to put forward the thought process…

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 Caching is an important aspect of building an application that performs well at web scale. Proper caching can reduce the number of API calls, save on CPU time, make requests faster, the application more responsive, and reduce the infrastructure cost. 
 We used one of the techniques mentioned in this article to reduce the average response…

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 Sign in with Apple launched earlier this year. Developers can use it to have users log in using their Apple accounts. This post outlines validating the authorizationCode received after the user signs in with Apple, generating JWT ES256 signature, verifying JWT signature using RS256 and using the refresh token to get an access token from…

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 Over the weekend, I spent some time experimenting with the new Runtime API and Lambda Layer that AWS announced last week. The goal was to create a custom runtime that I could use to start writing Lambda functions in PHP. Following is a brief summary of what I learned in the process and steps to create your own custom runtime.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 We live in interesting times. The cloud offerings from Amazon, Google and Microsoft have led to a situation where world-class infrastructure is available to startups and solopreneurs for very cheap, and most of the times, they can even get started for free.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 The context package in go can come in handy while interacting with APIs and slow processes, especially in production-grade systems that serve web requests. Where, you might want to notify all the goroutines to stop work and return. Here is a basic tutorial on how you can use it in your projects with some best practices and gotchas.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 What is Terraform and why do you need it? 
 If you have any resources in AWS/Google Cloud/Azure, etc. its a high likelihood that terraform can improve your workflow and make management of your cloud resources a breeze! I have used it with AWS, so, most of this post will discuss terraform in context of AWS. But, it works fine with Google…
I wanted to set up a blog that scales, is free and takes minimal effort from me to maintain. These days, there are multiple offerings that can be combined to achieve this. But, one of my requirements was also to be able to deploy my new posts and changes easily. 
 I wanted a set up where, once I make any changes, they go live immediately with little to no intervention on my part. I did not…
Software Engineer. Love to explore how technology can make our lives better.