I’m leaving Heroku Postgres for now. Here’s why — A little less than a year ago, I built Burplist, a free search engine for craft beer in Singapore. With the goal to keep my infrastructure cost as low as possible, I started off with Heroku Postgres free tier. With a row limit of 10,000 and a storage capacity of…

Automate dependency updates with Renovate with these 12 tips — Updating dependencies is boring. Despite its importance, we always find excuses to avoid updating them in the phrase of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” or “there are more important features to work on”. Over time, the maintainability of the projects deteriorates. …

I scraped the Michelin guide. Here’s how — At the beginning of the automobile era, Michelin, a tire company, created a travel guide, including a restaurant guide. Through the years, Michelin stars have become very prestigious due to their high standards and very strict anonymous testers. Michelin Stars are incredibly coveted. …

A quick guide to managing dotfiles for the lazy — There is a bazillion of tutorials and resources on how to manage dotfiles out there. If you haven’t heard of “dotfiles”, they are config files in Unix-like systems that start with a dot, e.g. .bashrc, .zshrc, .vimrc, .gitconfig just to name a few. By default, dotfiles are hidden and they…

Design, build and deploy a serverless paste tool for free — Today, we will be building a Pastebin clone — a web service that allows users to upload and share text or code through links known as ‘pastes’. What follows is my journey of how I create a Pastebin clone using serverless functions through Cloudflare Worker. If you are not familiar…

Design and build a low latency serverless URL shortener service with Cloudflare Worker and KV — Designing a URL shortener such as TinyURL and Bitly is one of the most common system design interview questions in software engineering. While meddling around with Cloudflare Worker to sync the Daily LeetCode Challenge to my Todoist, it gave me an idea to build an actual URL shortener that can…

A LeetCode a day, keeps unemployment away — If you have ever been on a job hunt for a software developer position, you would have come across the so-called LeetCode style interviews. Despite the fact that most of us don’t have to invert a Binary Tree at our actual job, that is how most coding/technical interviews are conducted…

Bad habits to break in Python with code examples — I have been guilty of all these bad habits. It took me some time to ditch them. Python is well known for its simplicity and versatility. As one of the most used programming languages, there are a lot of great tutorials out there. Unfortunately, the easy-to-learn syntax can sometimes mislead…