Pau Sanchez
Programming, technology & business
Tuesday afternoon. A simple idea crossed my mind. Wouldn’t it be nice to create a simple page that shows some real-time stats on how much money you make or how much money you spend on certain services on a per minute/hour/day/week/month/year basis? It could be used to see how your salary grows, or to get a feeling on the recurring costs of Netflix, or the cost of a particular AWS server instance or the revenue of your business or whatever you come up with.…
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Coding is life

Last night I was wandering around GitHub and somehow, at one point, I found myself staring at my profile page. and then I realized something… Look at this: Do you see it? It’s January 20th and I don’t have many commits in there. I mean, I’m not too bothered about it. I’ve been programming in some other non-public repositories elsewhere. That’s not it. Have another look: Do you see it now?…
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Back in the day (25+ years ago?) Windows 95/98 disk defrag/defragmenter tool was used in order to rearrange blocks of data in the disk and make applications run faster. Disks were crazy slow and running a defrag tool needed hours and hours to finish. On top of that, you could not use any program in the computer since any write operation would alter the disk composition and the whole process would need to be resatarted.…
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TL;DR I created another benchmark, this time only using web frameworks in nodejs. Unlike last time, this time I shared the repo so you can run it yourself. Feel free to jump directly to the benchmark results or the conclusions. Note: 2023-12-09: added redis benchmark Why? The other day I was checking the performance of some nodejs frameworks from the latest Tech Empower Web Framework Benchmarks (2023-10-17). Albeit probably one of the most wide-spread and easy to use in node, express performs quite poorly (on today’s standards).…
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It was early 2004, several months before graduating, when I joined a small startup named Trymedia. At that time, I had very little knowledge about startups. To be honest, I didn’t even know what the term ‘startup’ meant. Trymedia was a small startup that aimed to be the #1 online video game distributor for PC. I joined as a developer. However, before writing a single line of code, it was customary to spend several weeks rotating through various departments to gain an understanding of the entire process of publishing a game.…
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Here goes a story that taught me a couple of good lessons. It was a long long time ago. The company I was working for at the time offered plenty of internships, so I had the chance see numerous interns coming and going. One of them left a lasting impression on me. There was this guy who was going to do a 3-month internship. His CV blew my mind away. Despite not having graduated yet, he seemed to have mastered a bunch of technologies already.…
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Last week Daniel Lemire published a simple hello world web benchmark in multiple languages. There were a couple of things that picked my interest: bun.sh was supposed to be faster (the initial post was using bun+fastify, which was not optimal) nim ranking was certainly a surprise as well (Nim is a language that resembles python but is natively compiled). Some of the toy experiments from Lemire’s blog were slightly biased in the original post, since some of the toy web servers were returning “hello world” and some others “hello”, plus some had some sort of routing, while others did not.…
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New design I have decided to change the design of the blog, aiming for maximum simplicity. In this change, I switched from using WordPress to using Hugo as a platform. This way, I don’t have to worry about security updates, database maintenance, etc… which in practice didn’t take up much of my time, but it’s one less cognitive load. It simplifies several things for me, although I understand it’s not for everyone.…
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