Most tech interviews are terrible because they’re optimised to make the interviewer feel smarter than the candidate. A game of “gotcha” rather than true matchmaking. People generally aren’t comfortable hiring people smarter than they are, so they fall into imposter syndrome mentality and try to make themselves look clever. This is why we have so […]
The Gotcha Game That Drives Great Engineers Away Read More »
How will we train junior developers in a world of generative AI?And how do we get young people into software development when AI is already writing decent code for them? This is one of the most pressing challenges facing our industry today. GenAI is changing the learning curve, the incentives—and even the definition of what
How will we train junior developers in a world of generative AI? Read More »
It’s become fashionable to talk about “open” and “democratized” AI. But the reality is that training frontier LLMs like GPT-4 is structurally out of reach for all but a few hyperscalers. The reason isn’t just talent or data. It’s mainly infrastructure. Modern AI training requires tens of thousands of GPUs operating in perfect sync across
The Illusion of Democratized AI — And Why It Should Worry You Read More »
One of the biggest mistakes I see new CTOs make is thinking their team is still the tech team. It’s not. Once you step into an executive role, your primary team becomes the C-suite. Of course, you still lead engineering. You are still responsible for the systems, the architecture, the platforms. But if you are
Your real team as CTO Read More »
I didn’t want to setup django-q2, Celery, or any of the other heavier background task running options for Django, since I just wanted to do basic API calls and save tracking data to the db, without blocking user requests. My async work also didn’t need to be transactional, so losing the queue due to app
Easy async function execution in Python/Django using a queue and consumer Thread Read More »
I’m always astounded at how little South African companies pay for the same roles and experience as European companies do. The reality is that EU companies can generally afford to pay more than most SA companies, and the demand for talent is so high that developers are writing their own cheques. And often the EU
How to work for an international software company from SA and maximise your earnings Read More »
For some code you may want to limit its execution time, to prevent infinite loops that can’t be detected within the code. I ran in to this issue with HTMLCleaner on certain HTML, which due to the architecture could not keep track of possible loops with a counter. The code will need to handle thread
How to timeout a thread in Java / Limiting a threads execution time Read More »
I needed a Chrome extension that could open my single-page application and send any text field to it, and after editing, send the changes back to the field. Sounds simple, but it led me down many dead ends and complex APIs. The first catch was that chrome.windows.create can take a callback which gets a window object,
How to communicate between your Chrome extension and your SPA web app Read More »
This is because Found attaches multiple IPs to your 0298347602938ahdf.us-east-1.aws.found.io hostname. So if you use a TransportClient with ssl on port 9343 and add the first IP you find with client.addTransportAddress(new InetSocketTransportAddress(host, port)), it’ll eventually stop working because it’s stuck with an old, invalid IP. The solution is to lookup all the IPs on the hostname
I got burnt by this little architectural nuance in Elasticsearch recently. While batch processing items in a content store, updating their status, then searching for more items, I kept getting stale data and didn’t understand why. It turned out that Elasticsearch is _near_ realtime, with a default 1s refresh interval. So if you index and query within
