J. Carlos Roldán

Most recent language models have switched from the typical ReLU and GELU activation functions to something called SwiGLU. In trying to understand it, I realized most materials assume a lot of prior knowledge and there isn't a simple explanation of why it is good. So let's go the bottom-up approach and try to explain it from scratch. Activation...

Recently my posts were getting a bit too techy and serious, so I want to make up for it. Last year, I was in charge of setting up and maintaining our 40+ camp bikes, trikes, e-bikes and scooters, so here is a list of advice I gathered for anyone who needs to do some maintenance on theirs. Do it camp-wise Being able to fix the main problems for...

Coding time-related stuff is complicated: timezones, concurrency, API quotas, multi-party synchronization, networking… everything that time touches becomes messy. In this post, I want to describe some typical time-related function wrappers that are useful during the dev experience, with a special focus on front-end examples. Throttle Throttling...

After so long, I still find basic stuff in Python that I didn't know about. Here are some of my most recent TILs. --> You can use underscores to separate digits in a number and they'll be ignored by the interpreter: >>> 1000000 # confusing 1000000 >>> 1e6 # not confusing but creates a float 1000000.0 >>> 1_000_000 # great! 1000000 The sum...

After so long, I still find basic stuff in Python that I didn't know about. Here are some of my most recent TILs. --> You can use underscores to separate digits in a number and they'll be ignored by the interpreter: >>> 1000000 # confusing 1000000 >>> 1e6 # not confusing but creates a float 1000000.0 >>> 1_000_000 # great! 1000000 The sum...

Developers spend at least one third of their time working on the so-called technical debt [1,2,3]. It would make sense then that non-technical people working with developers had a good understanding of an activity that takes so much of their time. However, this abstract concept remains elusive for many. I believe this problem has to do with the...

Developers spend at least one third of their time working on the so-called technical debt [1,2,3]. It would make sense then that non-technical people working with developers had a good understanding of an activity that takes so much of their time. However, this abstract concept remains elusive for many. I believe this problem has to do with the...

Sometimes I have a conversation with an AI that looks particularly interesting and I share it with my friends or colleagues. I thought I could start a new post format, using the typical interview structure, to share it with the rest of the world. This is the first of those. Some replies are shortened (usually by sending "tl;dr" to the AI). Q: I...

Sometimes I have a conversation with an AI that looks particularly interesting and I share it with my friends or colleagues. I thought I could start a new post format, using the typical interview structure, to share it with the rest of the world. This is the first of those. Some replies are shortened (usually by sending "tl;dr" to the AI). Q: I...

The suggestions coming from Github Copilot look sometimes like alien technology, particularly when some incomprehensible code actually works. Recently, I stumbled upon this little excerpt that tests if a number is prime (and it actually works): !/^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/.test('1'.repeat(n))"> The ways of the universe are mysterious Let's dissect the...

The suggestions coming from Github Copilot look sometimes like alien technology, particularly when some incomprehensible code actually works. Recently, I stumbled upon this little excerpt that tests if a number is prime (and it actually works): !/^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/.test('1'.repeat(n))"> The ways of the universe are mysterious Let's dissect the...

After many years of making backends for one or another project, I find myself I keep frequently writing the same boilerplate code. Even if I tend to reuse my templates, the code ends up diverging enough to make switching between projects take some headspace. In an attempt to solve this, I created oink.php, a single-file PHP framework focused on...

After many years of making backends for one or another project, I find myself I keep frequently writing the same boilerplate code. Even if I tend to reuse my templates, the code ends up diverging enough to make switching between projects take some headspace. In an attempt to solve this, I created oink.php, a single-file PHP framework focused on...