This site and a few other small sites are hosted on a small VPS. Historically, I’ve been using MySQL as my database server. I recently did a system upgrade and my configuration files were replaced which resulted in MySQL frequently being killed by OOMKiller. After fixing this problem, I wanted to explore using SQLite as my production database.

I’ve recently been working quite a bit on a worker application in python. This worker picks up tasks over a gRPC service executes those tasks, and publishes the results via gRPC. Because of python’s Global Interpreter Lock (GIL), threads don’t help for CPU intensive workloads. Instead, I’m using multiprocessing to run additional processes per worker and get better CPU utilization at the cost of using a ton of memory. When a python process opens a child process it can also share state with the child process. The most interesting of these are synchronization and communication primitives like Event, Queue, Pipe, and Lock.

As a long time open source maintainer, I occasionally have to modify pull requests made by contributors via forks. If a contributor needs help adding/fixing tests, or addressing linter errors, it is often simpler for me to modify a pull request by adding a commit to their branch. I like this workflow as I can help the contributor out, and give them the option to revise my changes as well.

My long running Dell XPS laptop recently died. While trying to fix my secondary M2 drive, a series of hardware failures led to the mainboard becoming non-responsive. I was heartbroken. Up until that point, it had been a solid dependable machine. I was hoping to get many more years of use with that machine.

The front-end tools landscape is always evolving and changing. I’ve been aware of Tailwind for a few years, but haven’t had the chance to give it a try. Kevin Pfeifer from the CakePHP team has been using tailwind on a few projects and highlighted it as a CSS toolkit that would work well with CakePHP applications.

This Easter I had some time to dedicate to working through the rustling exercises. I still consider myself a novice rust developer. I frequently don’t know rust idioms, and spend a lot of time struggling to get an idea working at the fidelity of a prototype. Once I have something working, I’m able to revise and refine it incrementally, but getting the initial idea out is tough.

A few years back I made a post on how I work with PHP + SQLServer. In the intervening years, the code samples in that post have aged like milk and no longer work.

I’m working on an infrastructure application that provides a GRPC API to its clients. This will be a high throughput system, so we are building it in Rust using tonic and tokio to build the gRPC API. I wanted to implement request authentication for this system so that the service was resilient to Server-Side-Request-Forgery, and unauthenticated requests.