Technical Articles

If you’ve worked with LLMs for even a short while, by now you’re aware of a few things - LLMs are extremely powerful in generating text and fetching information about a vast variety of topics LLMs can perform computations and help you analyse data if armed with the right tools LLMs are not yet completely 100% reliable. This last point is where the building that you’re painstakingly constructing can crumble like a deck of cards very rapidly. And this is where LLM evaluations come in. ...

I work in the engineering division of a supply chain company and our development process, as most companies do, involves the setting up of our SaaS platform locally. This means that there are a lot of dependent services that need to be run first that support the overall execution of the platform. For e.g. - Our platform’s stack requires SQL Server, Solr, Redis, Postgres, RabbitMQ, MongoDB as core services to be running first. Once these are all running and available, a service called WebAPI can be run that makes use of some of the above to run as well. Following this, there are a few more microservices that need to run, but that need not be part of this article since the underlying concept will already come through with the above being demonstrated. ...

I’ve done some Napkin Math - an essential part of system design - in my different jobs in the last decade but it’s been ad-hoc or purpose driven at that moment and I’ve not thought about it much . Today, I came across a tweet from One2N and a rabbit hole of a blog by Simon Eskildsen after that and it made me want to consciously think about it for a few use cases if only to improve my engineering decisions. I’m sure I will get a lot of things wrong, but over time I hope to tune it to be right. ...

3 Blue 1 Brown is an amazing Youtube resource to learn Math and Physics concepts from! Manim is an opensource package created by them to help generate the animations they use to teach these concepts. In this article, I will create a similar video with the help of Claude and Manim! First, install miktex Then, in powershell, install ffmpeg : run choco install ffmpeg Create a new virtual environment and install manim and manimgl - uv pip install manim manimgl Use Claude to generate a manim program for a formula or something you want to demonstrate - E.g. : My Claude Example Create a program that you got out of claude - Manim Program for x-squared Execute it - manim -pql xsquared.py ExplainXSquared This results in this beautiful 3 Blue 1 Brown like video! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ql_vAj0ZVs ...

I’m going to be presenting a talk at a Mongo DB User group meetup later today and I thought I’d write about it so that it would - serve as reading material for folks wanting to go through the content of my talk later let everyone else know what this is all about. Let me pre-emptively say, I don’t know why I chose this to be the “TITLE” of the talk. It is extremely dry. But the topic is actually a lot of fun! ...

Solving https://neetcode.io/problems/is-anagram . Started at 1:29 AM. Let’s think about this for a minute. A word ‘w1’ is an anagram of a word ‘w2’ if all the characters in w1 belong in w2. Duplicates included. So the simplest solution would be to go through every letter in w1 and then check if it is there in w2. That’s a O(n^2) complexity because to check against the second string, each letter would have to be compared against. Let’s code it up : ...

One thing I’ve missed in Windows post my switch from Linux is the ability to create aliases for commands. In Linux, you can create an alias for a command by adding the following line to your .bashrc or .bash_profile file - alias ll='ls -l' This would allow you to use ll instead of ls -l in your terminal. In Windows, you can create a similar alias by creating a batch file and adding it to your PATH environment variable. ...

By now you’ve seen a lot of stuff being built using ChatGPT. A lot, Jerry. A LOT. I’ve built a few apps and extensions as well, but this is the first I’m writing about. Over the last 3-4 years, “building” software on any scale has seen quite a radical shift. Here’s an image to scale - So when I first tried to build a Chrome extension for a company hackathon in 2022, I took around 12 hours, pulling an all-nighter. I looked up documentation, Stack Overflow answers, sample blogs and trudged through the whole process - The way god intended it. And finally completed…something. The end result was something that did the job I wanted but it looked absolutely horrendous and I had to hand-wave over the UX because I had no time before the presentation. ...

TIL about the importance of buildContext in Azure Devops Pipelines for a Docker@2 task. 😵 Kept breaking my head trying to copy files over to an image and it kept saying they weren’t found. Tried a hundred combinations of paths and folder structures. Finally after some github-repo-hunting and documentation reading (No, LLMs didn’t help) , turned out I was building a dockerfile two levels deeper from my root path and the context was set by default as the path where the Dockerfile was present. ...

I’ve installed Python. Now what? If you can open CMD and when you execute python --version, you see Python 3.13.1 , it means your installation is successful. There are a Lot of syntaxes and operations to cover in Python and in programming in general. But I will consider some common operations in the real world and we will see what the programming construct for it is and what the corresponding Python commands are for it. ...