Recent content on Saurabh Kumar
I recently spent some time going deeper into gRPC, past the quickstart and into HTTP/2 framing, Protobuf encoding, and the parts of the system that sit around the service itself. I came away liking it. Contract-first APIs are useful, generated clients remove an entire class of mistakes, and streaming is part of the protocol rather than something attached later. I also came away with a list of…
My pi setup has a fast mode: a slot I wired into my own config for the small, high-volume questions, pointed at Bedrock’s Haiku 4.5. It is a good model. Cheap, responsive, and it answers the kind of small, contained question I throw at it twenty times a day without complaining. It is also not mine. It runs on hardware I do not own, it can be deprecated or quietly swapped the week I have come…
Django shipped async ORM methods back in 3.1, and for years I told people they were not really async. aget() , afilter() , acreate() , the whole a -prefixed surface — the docs called it async support, and in the sense that mattered it was not. Every one of those calls still blocked a real OS thread. You got coroutine syntax without coroutine performance. Django 6.0 fixed it for real in December…
My zsh prompt was taking close to a second to appear on a fresh terminal. Not catastrophic. But you feel it every time tmux spawns a new pane, and for me that is constantly. The config had grown for years, one eval and one plugin at a time, and nobody had been auditing it, least of all me. What follows is the audit, and the eight things I changed. The numbers are estimates, not measurements, and I…
The Moment Everything Changed Picture this: It’s March 2024, and somewhere in a conference room, executives at Redis Inc. are making a decision. They’re looking at their balance sheets, watching cloud giants like AWS and Google profit from offering managed Redis services, and they’re thinking: This isn’t fair. We built this. Why are they making all the money? So they pull…
“Apps I’ve been using regularly this year.” Heavily inspired by Jeff Triplett . Catalogued by Robb Knight’s App Defaults Mail Client : Edison Mail and gmail in browser Notes : Obsidian , SimpleNotes To-Do : Bullet Journel Photo Shooting : iPhone, Canon 6D Photo Editing : PhotoShop, Gimp Calendar : Notion Calendar Cloud File Storage : iCloud + Google Drive RSS : NetNewsWire Contacts : Apple…
Dive into Hebbian learning, the fundamental principle of how our brains learn and form memories. From Pavlov’s dogs to your morning coffee ritual, discover how neurons wire together through repetition.
Your Django app is hemorrhaging database resources. Each HTTP request creates and destroys expensive PostgreSQL connections, adding 50-70ms of latency your users feel directly. This connection overhead costs you real money in cloud environments where database CPU time translates to monthly bills. Django 5.1 (released August 7, 2024) eliminated this waste with native connection pooling 1 . Deploy…
Anyone who has run mypy on a real codebase knows the workarounds. You enable the daemon, you keep the incremental cache warm, you scope the check to the files you touched, and you still wait a few seconds for the editor to catch up after a rename. In CI it is worse, because the cache is cold and the full run can stretch into the minutes. None of this is broken, exactly. It is just the cost you…
Ever been in the middle of building a slick Django app with HTMX when you hit that authentication headache? You know the one - a user’s session times out, they click something, and instead of getting a proper login page, they get a weird login form fragment jammed into whatever DOM element was being updated. Not exactly the seamless experience we’re going for! I ran into this problem…
In this post, I’ll show you how to efficiently implement hundreds or even thousands of URL redirects on your server without sacrificing performance. We’ll use Nginx’s powerful map module which creates optimized hash tables for fast lookups. Creating Your Redirect Configuration First, create a file called redirects-map.conf where each line represents a single redirect rule in this…
What is this? A snapshot of what’s on my plate right now: work, learning, life. Inspired by nownownow.com . Work: Leading Web Services at Fueled as Principal Engineer. Currently shipping AI-assisted Q&A with source citations for South Pole ’s Quality Management Framework, and helping the team push more grounded LLM patterns into client work. Side / learning: Maintaining python-dotenv…
Projects Ongoing See /now/ for what I’m currently working on. Past client work South Pole - AI-assisted Q&A with source citations over their Quality Management Framework (RAG) Apple - Gamification engine and a multilingual, multi-region CMS behind an Android training app for Apple’s EMEA carrier retail staff Victoria’s Secret Community - Scaling a real-time community feed inside…
Notes on backend systems, performance, and the tools I lean on.