Why a home datacenter, and the three tools I let near it Most home labs end up as tool zoos. You start with a Pi and a Helm chart, and six months later you’re maintaining Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi, Crossplane, ArgoCD, Flux, a custom controller you wrote on a Sunday, and a Makefile that tries to glue them together. Each tool was a reasonable answer to a real problem when it arrived. The trouble is what happens at the joints between them. ...

The World of Skiplists The skiplist is a data structure that simplifies efficient data organization. This comprehensive guide explains how skiplists match the speed of balanced trees with a simpler design. I became fascinated with skiplists while implementing a database storage engine. Even with a trivial implementation, this turned out to be a significant project. While I plan to write about that experience someday, I wanted to first share two elegant solutions for different workload challenges: the skiplist and the B+-tree. Most tutorials I found either simply paraphrased the original sources or lacked the depth needed for true understanding. ...

When I first started coding in Go, I vividly recall staring at goroutines and channels for hours, trying to decode the mystery behind them. I had come from a world of analitics and automation in Python where I only recently dipped into asyncio, so Go’s concurrency model and primitives were a whole new world to me. I introduced race conditions, deadlocks, and other subtle bugs into all of my concurrent cod and the context package’s role beyond timeouts was a mystery to me. Slowly I put together enough pieces that I could write and debug concurrent code. ...

Introduction I love digging into how our everyday tools work under the hood! As a software engineer, I find it incredibly rewarding to peek behind the curtain. It builds my understanding of tools and patterns like nothing else could. Let me show you how to build a Write-Ahead Log (WAL) step-by-step - it’s more than just code, it’s a gateway to understanding the magic that powers our tools. Think about the tools you use every day: databases, version control systems, message queues. They’re all using similar patterns behind the scenes. A WAL is a fundamental building block for all of these tools. When you build this component yourself, you’ll: ...

Structured Data with HuggingFace Inference Endpoints This tutorial will show you how to generate structured data using the HuggingFace API. The baseline benefit of structured data is that it’s easy to parse and use, so you can treat models like APIs. The other benefits even extend to more accurate results with most LMs when generating structured data and speeding up inference. There are other libraries that can provide structured data, such as langchain structured output and instructor. But for HuggingFace’s Inference Endpoints, the capability is built in. However, good documentation of the feature has been hard to find. Most places where it’s used and sometimes referenced as documentation, mix it in with more complicated tasks. So I decided to write out a step-by-step example that’s simple, yet useful. ...

Atomic operations in Go provide a lightweight way to handle concurrent access to simple variables without the overhead of mutexes or the complexity of channels. They also perform significantly better in certain scenarios. While they’re not a silver bullet for all concurrency needs, atomic operations excel in specific scenarios where you need fast, simple synchronization. In this article, we’ll look at: what atomic operations are, how they’re implemented at the instruction set level, when to use them and when not to, as well as some common patterns for using them in code. By the end of reading you should understand when to reach for this valuable concurrency tool instead of better known tools like the sync package, goroutines, and channels. ...