Phil Booth

Blog

• The art of good code review

  a month ago

  This post is an extension to a talk I gave recently at work. It was arranged at short notice and the audience were experienced engineers, so I kept it brief and tried not to be patronising. But the feedback afterwards was quite positive and there were some questions too, so here's the extended version for anyone interested. Note that our team conducts pre-merge reviews, and some of the suggestions are specific to that context. I actually prefer post-merge reviews, but am yet to persuade everyone I work with that they're better. Oh, and trigger warning: this post contains opinions.
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• Vector search for dummies

  6 months ago

  Recently I built a system that uses vector search to logically truncate long documents and retain the most significant parts according to some search term. I'm a dummy, with no background in machine learning or mathematics, so there were new concepts for me to understand and implementation details to figure out. This post summarises what I learned.
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• Lessons learned from integrating with GPT in production

  7 months ago

  For the last ten months or so I've worked on integrating GPT (various flavours) with a large production codebase. It's been one of the most chaotic periods of my career, featuring numerous false starts, changes of direction and rapid improvements followed by major setbacks. This is what I've learned.
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• Four ways to shoot yourself in the foot with Redis

  7 months ago

  Production outages are great at teaching you how not to cause production outages. I've caused plenty and hope that by sharing them publicly, it might help some people bypass part one of the production outage learning syllabus. Previously I discussed ways I've broken prod with PostgreSQL and with healthchecks. Now I'll show you how I've done it with Redis too.
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• Nine ways to shoot yourself in the foot with PostgreSQL

  a year ago

  Previously for Extreme Learning, I discussed all the ways I've broken production using healthchecks. In this post I'll do the same for PostgreSQL.
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• Six ways to shoot yourself in the foot with healthchecks

  a year ago

  One reason I like working at startups is you get to wear many hats. Of course, by "wear many hats" I really mean "suffer occasional periods of extreme stress when things fail and there are no grownups you can go to for help". I like to think of it as Extreme Learning.
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• How to evaluate dependencies

  a year ago

  One of my stock interview questions goes: "When picking between dependencies to use in production, what factors contribute to your decision?" I'm surprised by how often I receive an answer along the lines of "Github stars" and not much else. I happen to think Github stars is a terrible metric for selecting production code, so this post sets out my idea of a healthier framework to evaluate dependencies.
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• How to debug

  a year ago

  As engineers we spend a lot of our time debugging problems, yet it's rarely taught as a skill in its own right. Some bugs are difficult enough that they can seem borderline impossible to solve, especially for devs toward the junior end of the spectrum. There's no worse feeling than being stuck on a hard problem, not knowing how to proceed. Of course, the right thing to do if you're stuck like that is ask for help; from your team, from other engineers in your org or social circle, from random strangers on the internet. As a random stranger on the internet then, this post is my attempt to help get you unstuck if you find yourself in that situation.
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