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In the world of content creation and management, automation is key. This very blog post is a testament to the power of AI and automation, as it was generated and published by Google’s Gemini in response to a single prompt. Here’s a look at the steps involved in this process: 1. The Prompt It all started with a simple instruction: “in blog create a new hugo markdown file matching the title of the article with a dash between words....

As a Director of Engineering, I’m always looking for ways to simplify our development and deployment processes. The more we can reduce external dependencies and streamline our tooling, the more reliable and maintainable our systems become. One of the most elegant solutions I’ve seen for this challenge comes from the Go ecosystem: embedding executables directly inside a Go binary. This technique is a game-changer for building self-contained applications. Imagine deploying a single, static binary that contains not only your core application but also all the necessary command-line tools or other executables it depends on....

Introduction In the ever-evolving landscape of site reliability engineering (SRE), ensuring the highest levels of uptime is the ultimate goal. Behind the scenes, a symphony of processes and practices come together to achieve this, and at the heart of it all are the rituals that we, as a large SRE team, follow with unwavering dedication. In this blog post, we’ll dive deep into the rituals that shape our approach to maintaining uptime, shedding light on how these practices contribute to a resilient system and empowered team....

Problem One of the most effective ways that has helped me focus is answering the question, “What problem are we solving?”. For this post, the problem that I am solving is how to communicate this idea to readers so they too can focus on what to solve. When there are 100 things to fix, what do you fix? One of the better articles that I read about focusing on a problem https://jasonfeifer....

Problem What are effective strategies for an engineer to communicate with their peers and answer their inquiries efficiently? Solution Appeal to your fellow engineers through shared cultural touchstones, like the well-known characters from science fiction that most engineers are familiar with. Case: Time Estimation in Software Engineering Every software engineer inevitably has to provide an estimate for when a code block, task, or project will be completed. Defining what “done” means can be complex....

Review of Flickr Architecture Before we delve into the Postmortem let’s review the details of the database architecture and Flickr’s overall Architecture at that time. Flickr at that time was a PHP shop, running PHP 4, using Smarty as its template Engine in Apache running MODPHP. PHP was everyplace because it’s a great engine. I am sure that many hate this statement, that PHP is X or PHP is Y but in reality, it enabled Flickr to jump from a top 100 destination in the USA to a top 5 destination in less than 2 years....

Problem I am helping out a friend, to process reports which are behind a paywall and store them in a database to create a churn detector, which will enable his crew to address the churn at hand. Details What is churn? Churn is a term used by companies to denote that a customer no longer wants to use the services they previously paid for. Each company has different metrics to give an indication that a customer is CHURING....

What are Vector Embeddings Let’s go back to the number line. The distance between two points; This is a good example of what Vector Embeddings are, fingerprinting a document into a number in multi-dimensional space. Since a document can be represented as a number (series of numbers), now a relation can be made between two documents. The relation in terms of distance between two vectors (which could be a markdown document for instance), small distances have a high relatedness and large distances suggest a low relatedness....

Saw an ask on Twitter A person I follow on Twitter tweeted: Is there a git/version control for prompts? I hate losing great prompts and I’d love to be able to iterate on them. So I created a quick command line chat to GPT-4 https://github.com/dathan/go-openai-prompt-git-save It is a go program, and you need an OPENAI Token and a GitHub User Token in your environment. The program is very simple. From the terminal, have a chat interface to OpenAi, and save the prompts asked, to GitHub, with the content from GPT-4’s response....

What is Prompt Engineering Let’s ask chat gpt: Response in text Prompt engineering is the practice of crafting effective prompts to generate specific outputs from language models like LLMs (Large Language Models). It involves selecting the appropriate vocabulary, formatting, and instructions to help the model understand the desired task and generate the desired output. Effective prompts can improve the performance of LLMs in various natural language processing tasks, such as language translation, sentiment analysis, text summarization, and language generation....