Category Archives: Uncategorized

How I Tested Malaysia’s Open Data Portals with Plain English

Most end-to-end test suites drive a real browser and click through an app like a user. They check whether a page renders and whether elements appear. But they don’t check whether the numbers on those elements are correct. A data-pipeline bug that shows Malaysia’s population as 3.4 million instead of the real 34 million slips […]

How I Built a Production-Ready CI/CD Pipeline for a Monorepo-Based Microservices System with Jenkins, Docker Compose, and Traefik

This tutorial is a complete, real-world guide to building a production-ready CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins, Docker Compose, and Traefik on a single Linux server. You’ll learn how to expose services on a custom domain with auto-renewing HTTPS, and implement a smart deployment strategy that detects changes and redeploys only the affected microservices. This helps avoid […]

The Hidden Tax of Infrastructure: Why Your Team Shouldn’t Be Running It Anymore

Most engineering teams don’t set out to manage infrastructure. They start with a product idea, a customer need, or a business problem. Infrastructure enters the picture as a means to an end. Servers need to be provisioned. Databases need to be configured. Networks need to be secured. At first, this work feels necessary and even […]

From Metrics to Meaning: How PaaS Helps Developers Understand Production

Modern production systems generate more data than most developers can realistically process. Every request emits logs. Every service exports metrics. Every dependency introduces another layer of signals. In theory, this should make systems easier to understand. In practice, it does the opposite. Dashboards become dense, alerts become noisy, and when something breaks, the same questions […]

How to friction-max your learning with software engineer Jessica Rose [Podcast #216]

Today Quincy Larson interviews Jessica Rose. She’s a dev and teacher who’s worked on open data projects at Mozilla and lots of open source projects. We talk about: How the whole world is hard, and how embracing that difficulty rather than avoiding it can make you a better thinker The Bad Website club, a free […]

Shadow AI Explained: Why Employees Are Using AI Behind Your Back

A quiet shift is happening inside modern companies. It’s not visible in dashboards. It’s not tracked in logs. It’s not approved by IT or security teams. Yet it’s everywhere. Employees are using AI tools on their own. They paste code into chatbots to debug faster. They upload documents to summarise reports. They generate emails, analyse […]

Traditional Scraping vs AI Scraping: A Practical Guide for Developers and Data Teams

Enormous amounts of data are constantly generated on the open web. Product prices change, job listings go live and get taken down, news articles are published, and company information gets updated. For developers and teams that rely on this kind of data, the question has never been whether to scrape the web, but how to […]

How to Streamline Search in Web Applications with Elasticsearch

They say data is the new gold. But navigating through a large dataset to meet the demands of consumers in record time still gives backend devs a headache. Conventional database queries often aren’t totally reliable in getting accurate search results fast. But fortunately, Elasticsearch comes to the rescue. In this article, I’ll walk you through […]