Opus 5.5 is awesome
I criticized Opus 5 for being chatty and unfocused. Opus 5.5 fixed it, and I built two apps I now use daily.
Alex
My last six months at Evernote, after Bending Spoons took over
I was an Engineering Manager at Evernote. I managed the team that built and operated Evernote’s notifications system, handling 110M messages in 2022. After Bending Spoons acquired Evernote, almost everyone ended up getting laid-off. Severance packages come with a non-disparagement clause. I quit on my own terms, so I am one of a few people … Read more
Why I stopped blogging and why I’m back
I started this blog in 2013. I was active for 5 years, with a lot of ups and downs. I took a long break and wanted to review what worked and what didn’t, before I started posting again. I go into more detail in the following video, if you are interested. The short version I … Read more
I Had 24 Claude Code Skills. I Only Needed 9
I spent half a day cleaning up my Claude Code setup: 24 skills became 9 (removed duplicates and unused) and CLAUDE.md went from 246 lines to 123. These observations are from Claude Code 2.1.252; behavior may differ in other versions. The biggest lesson: measure instead of guessing. I expected MCP tools to be expensive. My … Read more
I Miss the Old Claude Code
Claude Code used to feel like an extension of my brain. Now I fight it to get work done.
Top 28 Programming Books Recommended by Hacker News Users (Analyzed with ChatGPT)
This blog post is a collections of programming books that comes up most often in various discussion on this subject. The data was Scrapped/Polished with LLMs so take it with a grain of salt. Rank Book Title Authors Mentions 1 The Pragmatic Programmer Andrew Hunt, David Thomas 7 2 Designing Data-Intensive Applications Martin Kleppmann 6 … Read more
Transcribing Speech to Text with Python and OpenAI API (Whisper)
Implementation 1. Getting OpenAI API Key 2. Install OpenAI module In your command line run 3. Generating the Transcript Modify and run the following Python script Example Back Story from 2018 In 2018 I wrote a blog post titled Transcribing Speech to Text with Python and Google Cloud Speech API. Back then, the task was … Read more
Load Testing Google Cloud PubSub
I wrote the following tool to do load test on Google Cloud PubSub. It’s a pretty simple but effective tool to generate a lot of data. This assumes user is using gcloud auth application-default login for credentials. In this particular examples: Every third request is adding a different attribute. Python dict as a payload that … Read more
How to Manually Add Phrases to Localize.js
Localize.js is a great service. Gone are the days of having to internationalize your websites by hand. That being said, existing UI has a pretty annoying in my opinion limitation – there is no way to add phrases manually. 99% of the time, Localize.js is able to automatically pick up all of the phrases on … Read more
Golang “Set” Data Structure Example
Golang does not have built it sets. Basic functionality can be mimicked using maps with empty struct{}. Another option is to use a Boolean value, but empty struct does not use any space and therefore more efficient. Another benefit of empty struct is that Boolean value can be set to true or false, which could … Read more