A collection of thoughts and experiments that at one point occupied my time, some still do. These are the things happening in my idle cycles.
Lately I've been thinking about database design and the implications for query performance. I have found myself repeatedly arguing against architectural complexity in favor of "just let the database do that" and I thought it was probably a good idea to further develop an intuition for performance against some hard numbers.
read more...I've been munging configuration data for a bunch of hardware devices and it has me thinking on ways to improve some of that workflow. These are just a few notes on what has proven useful or interesting as I continue to explore my options.
read more...Here's an interesting thing I found this week. In different relational databases you might find that despite indexing a column a sequential scan is still required for querying. Here's a hint for PostgreSQL and SQLite.
read more...I recently enabled my own ability to host CGI applications on this site. Thinking on the sorts of capabilities this enables for myself I have spent some time investigating new tools, the most interesting of which is probably Fossil.
read more...Rouding out my last entry with one final thought. How simple can you make the deserialization of XML into Python objects? How clunky is it in practice?
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I was thinking again about data serialization in Python after
reading an
interesting post that suggests
using functools.singledispatch as a way of
encapsulating JSON encoding per datatype and it got me thinking
again about XML.
I noticed some latency in a unit test on a single machine. It turned into a bit of a rabbit hole that took some time to get to the bottom of. I think I at least understand some libraries and tools better as a result though!
read more...While perusing the documentation I found an enticing reference to CGI programming. Go is of course a reasonably modern language compared to TCL but the fact that they've included support for CGI is novel given the state of Python which has deprecated its CGI module.
read more...There have been a few instances lately in which I've found myself lamenting the number of libraries available to aid in testing Python. I'm getting the feeling again that not only is your test framework making things worse but also the ease of installing libraries exacerbates issues of quality in the design of projects.
read more...After configuring HAProxy on this server I've been trying out a few things that have been in the back of my mind for some time. Here I document configuring a client certificate to mutually authenticate a web browser to a subdomain and limit access based on its presence.
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