Tiny Project

Add Dota 2 Upcoming Match to Google Calendar

💡Update March 2023: Check out this Google Calendar add-on instead I rely heavily on Google Calendar to manage my rather chaotic schedule in life. Probably like you, I want to know what and when is the next Dota 2 tournament happening, especially for Major Championships and The International. I want

DevOps

Backing Up Ghost Blog in 5 Steps

I’ve been writing on my self-hosted Ghost blog for some time now. In case you’re wondering, this site is hosted on a Digital Ocean Droplet. For the most part, I felt like I was doing something inconsequential that only meant much to me. Today, the site has grown

Postgres

I Export PostgreSQL Queries to Google Sheets For Free. Here’s How

A couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have known that connecting a PostgreSQL database to Google Sheets could be this expensive. Despite being a trivial problem, existing market solutions such as Zapier, KPIBees, etc. require us to pay a premium for it. TL;DR: How to export PostgreSQL queries

Cloudflare

How I Set Up CI/CD Pipeline for Cloudflare Worker

Today, most of my projects on GitHub are kept up to date with Renovate. With auto-merging enabled, I want to have enough confidence that the automated dependencies update would not cause any regressions. Testing Cloudflare Worker is a bit out of whack. Don’t get me wrong, I love Cloudflare

Heroku

Saying Goodbye to Heroku Postgres for Now

A little less than a year ago, I built Burplist, a free search engine for craft beer in Singapore. Intending to keep my infrastructure cost as low as possible, I started with Heroku Postgres free tier. With a row limit of 10,000 and a storage capacity of 1 GB,

DevOps

12 Tips to Self-host Renovate Bot

Updating dependencies is boring. Despite its importance, we always find excuses to avoid updating them in the phrase of “if it ain't broke, don't fix it” or “there are more important features to work on”. Over time, the maintainability of the projects deteriorates. The team ends

Go

How I Scraped Michelin Guide Using Golang

At the beginning of the automobile era, Michelin, a tire company, created a travel guide, including a restaurant guide. Through the years, Michelin stars have become very prestigious due to their high standards and very strict anonymous testers. Michelin Stars are incredibly coveted. Gaining just one can change a chef&

CLI Tools

How To Manage Dotfiles With Chezmoi

There is a bazillion of tutorials and resources on how to manage dotfiles out there. If you haven’t heard of “dotfiles”, they are basically config files in Unix-like systems that start with a dot, e.g. .bashrc, .zshrc, .vimrc, .gitconfig just to name a few. By default, dotfiles are

Cloudflare

How To Build a Pastebin Clone for Free

Today, we will be building a Pastebin clone — a web service that allows users to upload and share text through links known as ‘pastes’. What follows is my journey of how I create a Pastebin clone using serverless functions through Cloudflare Worker. If you are not familiar with Pastebin, I’

Cloudflare

I Built My Own TinyURL. Here’s How I Did It

Designing a URL shortener such as TinyURL and Bitly is one of the most common system design interview questions in software engineering. While meddling around with Cloudflare Worker to sync the Daily LeetCode Challenge to my Todoist, it gave me an idea to build an actual URL shortener that can

Cloudflare

How I Sync Daily Challenge With Leetcode API to Todoist

If you have ever been on a job hunt for a software developer position, you would have come across the so-called LeetCode style interviews. Even though most of us don’t have to invert a Binary Tree at our actual job, that is how most coding/technical interviews are conducted

Python

Ditch These 7 Bad Habits in Python

I have been guilty of all these bad habits. It took me some time to ditch them. Python is well known for its simplicity and versatility. As one of the most used programming languages, there are a lot of great tutorials out there. Unfortunately, the easy-to-learn syntax can sometimes mislead

Career

The Best Thing I’ve Done for My Career Is Taking Notes

I have a lot more to learn. The more I learn, the less I realize I know. As I was learning more, I was quickly overwhelmed by the number of things I had to keep track of. The solution was too obvious. Today, I will talk about getting in the

Career

How To Ask for Help as a Developer

It’s 4 p.m. at work, your code still doesn’t work and you have no idea why. Your brain screams to get help, but you are a shy engineer with a pathological fear of annoying people. The truth is, we simply hate the thought of getting rejected. The

Tiny Project

How I Built A Craft Beer Search Engine For Free

Craft beers are delicious. Expensively delicious. When I first came to Singapore, I was introduced to the wonders of craft beers. Coming from Malaysia, I felt spoiled by the number of choices available here. Soon, my friends and I got caught up with the craft beer fever, but there was

Python

When To Use Generators in Python

Today, “what are Generators in Python” and “what are Generators used for in Python” are some of the most popular Python interview questions. Often, a Generator is considered one of the slightly more intermediate concepts in Python. If you are new to learning Python, you may not have come across

Python

All You Need To Know About Dataclass in Python

It is common for us to work with simple data structures such as a Tuple (tuple) or a Dictionary (dict) in Python. We use them almost everywhere and every day in our lives programmers to store data. For instance, we can represent a car object with the code example below:

Python

Python Context Managers: When and Why To Use Them

Regarded as an obscure feature by some, the with statement in Python is often only used when dealing with file operations. Below is an example to read and write a file with Python's built-in open function. with open('hello.txt', 'w') as f: data

Python

Stop Using Exceptions Like This in Python

Welcome to the exciting world of error handling in Python! Imagine building a blog that's running smoothly, with users signing up and creating posts. But wait a minute, what if something unexpected happens? Like a user trying to use an email that's already taken? That'

Python

Tuples vs Lists vs Sets in Python

In Python, there are four built-in data types that we can use to store collections of data. With different qualities and characteristics, these built-in data types are List (list), Tuple (tuple), Set (set), and Dictionary (dict). In this article, we are going to dig into the rabbit holes of Lists,

Python

3 Useful Python F-string Tricks You Probably Don’t Know

Long gone are the days when Python developers used the % operator to perform string formatting in Python. Sometime later down the road when Python 3.0 was introduced, common use of the % the operator was gradually replaced with calling the .format() method on the String object. Fast forward to Python

Python

How To Write Clean Code in Python

What exactly is “clean code”? Generally speaking, clean code is code that is easy to understand and easy to change or maintain. As code is more often read than written, honing the skill of crafting clean code is crucial. Today, I'm sharing a collection of tips that I&

Productivity

3 Best Backend Developer Tools You Should Use

Every developer has a toolset that we will use while coding. These are tools that we live and breathe with at our jobs daily, and chances are, we can’t work effectively without them. For the most part, everyone has their favorite code editor like Vim, Sublime Text, Atom, VSCode,

Scrapy

How To Deploy Python Scrapy Spiders for Free on Cloud

Running Scrapy spiders in your local machine can be very convenient during the early stage of development. But, we would eventually need to deploy and run our spiders in the cloud periodically. In search of free options for running periodic crawling jobs, I have come across a few options available

Scrapy

5 Useful Tips While Working With Python Scrapy

Today, there are a handful of Python Scrapy tutorials out there. However, I find that most of the tutorials do not cover these low-hanging fruits that can greatly improve the developer experience of web scraping. In this post, I will be sharing with you some quick and easy tips that