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Posts - Page 3

Bloom filters

July 1, 2023

Bloom filters are a data structure that can quickly answer whether an element is a member of a set. Because they are probabilistic, they tell you whether an element is maybe in a set, or definitely not in a set.

Don't filter in Django's qet_queryset

January 19, 2023

In Django models, it’s easy to customize the queryset that’s returned by a model manager. Say that you’re working on a blog, and you have a model that looks something like this:

"The right tool for the job"

January 9, 2022

I’ve been thinking a lot about engineering values and principles lately, and one that keeps popping up is “use the right tool for the job”. I don’t think it’s a very good principle.

npm install is curl | bash

September 9, 2021

Today, GitHub published a write-up on a number of CVEs¹ in the npm packages tar and @npmcli/arborist. In their own words,

A web of trust for npm

October 2, 2020

In 1984 the co-inventor of Unix, Ken Thompson, delivered a seminal speech in which he highlighted that you can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself ¹. For a while, this lesson was largely ignored as open-source package registries like RubyGems, PyPI and npm grew rapidly. However, as we’re seeing more and more supply-chain attacks through software dependencies, the risks of using unvetted dependencies are becoming clearer.