A Useful Shell Pattern

If you work at the unix command line you probably execute pipelines of programs to test ideas. It’s part of the unix way. Sometimes …

Split for Embedding

Different embedding models have different limits on input tokens. When you want to create embeddings for a large corpus, one major annoyance …

Checking Make Vars

If your make target recipes use make variables you may want to test that they are set before using them. This would look something like …

Sqitch Templates

Sqitch has a template mechanism that follows the same design pattern as its migration files. This makes it easy to manage templates with …

Variables in Sqitch

Sqitch supports variables in the config file like this:

[target "foo"]
    engine = pg
    uri = your-connection-string-here …

PostgreSQL Types by Reference

When writing a function to work with a specific table structure, you may have to match the argument types with table columns. If a table …

Exit Codes in psql

In PostgreSQL certain commands are forbidden in transactions or functions, and lack IF NOT EXISTS variants. Examples include CREATE DATABASE …

Second Brain

Someone recently told me about Building a Second Brain. The book presents a “CODE” approach: Capture, Organize, Distill, …

Separating Storage From llm Embeddings

The llm program uses sqlite to store embeddings. I want to store my embeddings in PostgreSQL. Rather than try to alter the built-in storage, …

Programming Throwdown

Jason Gauci and Patrick Wheeler have an excellent podcast called Programming Throwdown. I know Jason from the Austin CTO Club. The first …