One of the things that was a bit magical to me was how various systems downstream of the database got their data. Things like indexing, caching, ElasticSearch, or other data pipelines were a bit of a blackbox to me. At my previous startup, we used ElasticSearch to power the bank selection autocomplete feature. However, because the data rarely changes, we …

I’ve been using various tools to gather my RSS feeds for several years now. First with Huginn and now I have a setup using Node-RED. A key part of my setup involves parsing webpages and output just the essential content similar to Reader mode in browsers. Originally, I was using the Readability Parser API. However, when it was shutdown in …

Moneydance is a personal finance software that helps to track your money and investments. There is no subscription cost. Once I paid for the software I own it forever. It’s cross-platform so for a person that uses multiple OS, including Linux on desktop, it’s perfect for me. My wife can use it too and we keep track of our finances …

Huginn is an open-source software similar to Yahoo Pipes, IFTTT, Zapier, or Microsoft Flow. Node-RED is another similar open-source software but it’s aimed more at IoT applications. I was using Huginn for about a year for the purpose of ingesting data and outputting RSS feeds. This week I swapped out Huginn and started using Node-RED instead. So far it’s working …

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I recently bought a 2016 4-door Mazda 3 i Sport with Automatic transmission and the Preferred Equipment Package (MSRP $20,730.00). This is the second time I bought a car and I viewed it as another learning experience. The table below shows the various prices I got from different sources. They’re wildly different from what I actually paid in the end. …

Here’s an interesting discussion that came up during a code review at my company Kash. One reviewer said the following JavaScript code looks weird and was surprised that it even works: and that the following coding convention is more preferable and more readable: The author of the change disagrees and wonders why there is confusion about that. The code says …

A little while ago I came across Flippa. It’s a marketplace that allows people to sell domain names they own. It was surprising to me to see 4-letter domain names being sold on there. I guess I just haven’t been paying attention to domain names. Aside from .com domains, I also saw 4-letter .org domain names like ocag.org being sold. …

Although I took a compiler course while in university over 10 years ago, I don’t write parsers or compilers on a day-to-day basis. So even though I understand that parsers are probably what’s behind some of the JavaScript tools I use, it sometimes feel a bit like magic. Today we enjoy tools like Babel, ReactJS, ESLint or JSHint, and UglifyJS, …

Pingdom recently sent out an email notification telling users that their free monitoring tier will no longer feature 1-minute check interval. That’s too bad because I’ve been using the free tier for my personal blog. When I needed something for my company I was happy to pay Pingdom for the higher tier. The new free tier from Pingdom only allows …