Polymath Engineer Weekly #93

Programmer's Regrets, Serverless Postgres, Engine Simulation, Graceful Shutdown, RAGs, Should rest your steaks? and Social Engineering

Felipe Alcantara

May 07, 2024

Hello again.

Comic of the week

Links of the week

10 regrets of experienced programmers

I recently asked "You are on your deathbed, what do you regret the most about programming?". Let's break down the biggest mistakes shared by most software engineers.

Neon - Serverless PostgreSQL

Neon is composed of a stateless compute layer and a disaggregated storage layer. Postgres instances form the stateless compute layer, and the storage layer is itself disaggregated and consists of a fleet of storage nodes where each node stores the data of multiple tenants. The fleet is broken into horizontally scalable services for the write-ahead logs (WAL service) and data pages (Page service).

Multicylinder Engine Simulation

In this video, I continue working on Engine Simulator, pushing the fluid simulation to its performance limits with 4 cylinder engines.

Graceful shutdown in Kubernetes

If the nature of those pods is so ephemeral, what happens when a pod is in the middle of responding to a request but is told to shut down?
Is the request completed before shutdown?
What about subsequent requests? Are those redirected somewhere else?

Advanced Retriever Techniques to Improve Your RAGs

We know that when we apply a “Naive retrieval”, we are calculating the similarity of all the chunks of the vector database with the query. The more chunks the vector store has, the more similarity calculations will have to be done. Now, imagine being able to do a prior filter based on the metadata, and after selecting the chunks that meet the conditions imposed in relation to the metadata, calculate similarities. This can drastically reduce computational and time cost.

Proof Resting Doesn't Keep Meat Juicy

Everyone knows you have to rest your steaks. I used to believe that, too. That’s the thing about science: it doesn’t matter what you believe, if you experiment diligently and follow the data, the truth will come out. Watch this video and you'll also learn how to manage carryover proactively. You’ll never have to suffer through another sad, overcooked steak for fear of losing the juices.

I’m not fully convinced yet. I guess I should run my own experiments and see it for myself. Although it seems that water content is similar between both, in my experience I find a difference in final texture and perception of “juiciness”.

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