16 years ago I took on my first “proper” job. I’d done manual labour, I’d made websites for friends and family, but 16 years ago I got chatting to someone over Twitter DMs (this brand new feature) followed by CoD4 lobbies and started working with them.

Many years ago, I had to make a website. Slightly different to the normal websites we were churning out. It would be used in 5,000 locations, across 160 countries, by about 30 million people (at the time) a month. It showed weather, local news, and more content specific to each location. At the time Amazon EC2 was two years old, scaling was a still unsolved problem, and we had to make this thing bulletproof.

Following on from some others, here’s a list of what I’m using on my Mac in 2023. Main focus is web dev tasks.

HybridLogic, my little corner of the Internet, turned 18 a few months ago. I wanted to make a little list of things this site has used, or not used, that have come and gone in that time. No order or rhyme, just thoughts.

I spent the day building out some wood framing, ready for plasterboard with my Dad. It’s always good, learning skills that are so different to everything I do just sat on a computer. I also got to learn about the difference between joinery, and cabinetry.

We have a cron job. It runs frequently, looking for rows that have changed, or their parent relationships that have changed, or grandparents. There’s millions of rows. These cron jobs were causing tablescans of 200K+ rows each time. Replica latency was horrible.

CTEs and a few well-placed indexes. Down to only scanning rows needed. Weirdly just indexes and joins/subqueries didn’t help.

This post sponsored by me pulling my hair out staring at DB graphs for three days.

This is reference for anyone who needs it in order to create a message extension (previously called compose extension) in MS Teams. If you stray outside of the TS/C# world, it’s a pain to find all of this out.

I was going to write about the hardest tech problem I ever faced, but I figured let’s start off with something a bit easier. Writing code to solve something that seems very simple to a human, but was an utter pain in reality.

In a second big win for the week, we submitted our iOS app for review this week. Apple been Apple rejected it the first time.

At work, we recently released a big new feature I’ve spent the past few weeks and months working on; semantic search. Given all of your uploaded documents, allow natural language questions against them. Here’s some post-release thoughts.