1 day agoFrom Ansible to NixOSI gave up; that was the sixth time I bricked my Raspberry Pi with apt dist-upgrade. I needed a way to go back to a working state. Naive solutions first My Raspberry Pi was running Raspberry Pi OS lite (derived from Debian). I’m no expert with Linux. My best ideas were: Restore a…Raspberry Pi9 min readRaspberry Pi9 min read
4 days agoLet GPT write Javadocs in your PRYou maintain a repo. Contributors keep adding methods without doc comments, making your codebase more obscure over time. You tried to impose a rule: all new methods should be accompanied by a Javadoc (let’s say your software is Java-based). It backfired and turned away some contributors: “I wrote the code…Programming8 min readProgramming8 min read
Nov 13Backs off smartly, typed, self-documenting: How I write scripts for orchestrating APIsI work as a software engineer at a tech company. My team has outgrown many infra and platform teams, so most of our needs for internal tooling comes down to our own hands. To be precise, me. If that sounds like you and your team, you may find this post…API8 min readAPI8 min read
Oct 23Make Any Code Linter Report IncrementallyIncrementally improving code quality can be challenging, especially when working with large codebases and code linters that operate at the file level. Imagine this: A developer has made a minor change to an 800-line Python script, and the linter is bombarding them with 99+ warnings, blocking their commit. This situation…Software Development5 min readSoftware Development5 min read
Sep 16Data-agnostic testing methods: Fuzzing, Traffic Mirror, Fault Injection, and Bug BashIn a previous post, I categorized “software tests” based on their scope (unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests) and purpose (acceptance tests, regression tests, etc.). Another way to classify tests is by their data-agnosticism: Do we know what we are feeding into the program? Here’s a popular joke among…Testing6 min readTesting6 min read
Sep 4Log from Jenkins Jobs to GitHub Pull Requests as ChecksYou have a GitHub repo and a Jenkins server. The Jenkins has Jobs for running unit tests, computing code coverages, and executing static analyses. Today, each time someone opens a PR to your repo, you ask them to 1) run those Jobs, 2) take screenshots of the results, and 3)…Jenkins9 min readJenkins9 min read
Published inData Science with Ming·Aug 27How to spot the outlier dataset when you only have the statisticsYou have 4 datasets, but not the raw data; just their statistics. They are the 4 runs of the same experiment. You suspect that one of runs might be corrupted. Without access to the raw observed values, how do you find out the outlying dataset? In this short article, I…Statistics5 min readStatistics5 min read
Aug 12Buy an enamel mug next time you visit ChinaWhy? Because they look soviet and have funny captions. Here’s what you’d get if you search for the English phrase, enamel mugs: Low-key, adorable and decent for most occasions, aren’t they? But if you search for the term in Chinese, 搪瓷杯:Funny4 min readFunny4 min read
Jul 3How to get Notion-AI-like Autocomplete with LLMs in Obsidian, offlineNotion AI is cool, but I use Obsidian. Also, I prefer to keep my notes offline. How do I mimic the write-for-you experience as close as possible? In this post, I introduce my setup of enabling LLM-powered autocomplete feature in Obsidian. Today’s recipe only involves 3 ingredients: Alpaca, a large…AI2 min readAI2 min read
Jul 1A brief example of tailoring words for different listeners: engineers and managersHere’s how I’d usually phrase a story, which is a quite objective narrative: We have 2 CI servers: A weak one and a strong one. Our PRs trigger a Job on the weak server. [System diagram here] The disk on the weak server frequently becomes full, and — each time…2 min read2 min read
