A Byte of Coding Issue 384

Hey-yo,

If you still haven’t filled out the form from yesterday’s issue, please do it here.

Have a good weekend and here’s the issue!

PS. Gonçalo Valério covers some cool tools you can use with local LLMs. Also I’m now addicted to this song. Pretty poppy, but I can appreciate any music genre.

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Notes on git's error messages

Published: 10 April 2024

Tags: git

Julia Evans shares some notes on figuring out what exactly is wrong in git errors.

Some highlights:

• has push, pull, checkout, switch, checkout, status, rebase, and clean

• useful if you don’t use git CLI much

• the error messages are generally pretty good once you have a basic understanding of how git works

Rating fluctuations in chess

Published: 9 April 2024

Tags: math, chess, algorithms

Kevin Galligan dives into the ELO function for scoring players in chess (also many other games) and how it can fluctuate.

Some highlights:

• based on a sigmoid function

• has ambiguity in regards to how often a player will win and doesn’t account for first move advantage

• fluctuations of up to 100 points across 100 games are pretty normal

A guide to organization modeling

Published: 10 February 2024

Tags: sponsored, auth, architecture

WorkOS has published a guide that “surfaces complexities and implementation details” for supporting user-team-organization relationships in B2B auth.

Some highlights:

• “if you ever want to sell to an enterprise your backend needs to be ready to support complex models of users and teams”

• looks at the different ways you can implement the database tables for modeling the organization

• most of the complexity comes from users that need to be a part of multiple organizations

Building PostgreSQL Extensions: Dropping Extensions and Cleanup

Published: 10 April 2024

Tags: postgres, database

David Christensen explores how to cleanup postgres extensions, in the context of a recent experience he had with dropping a cron based extension that caused errors due to the cron job still running.

Some highlights:

• “When Postgres removes an extension (via the DROP EXTENSION command), it will also remove any dependent objects that were created for this extension”

• event triggers and associated functions are used to run on extension drop to clean up

• have to drop event trigger, associated function, and extension schema