Blog - kimserey lam

Feb 26, 2021

Setuptools And Python Wheels

During the development of a Python application, we interact with tools like pip and libraries like setuptools. Pip allows us to install packages while setuptools is a library built on top of distutils providing necessary tools to package and distribute our own application. Python supports two types of distributions, wheels and source distributions. In today’s post we will look at the usage of both of them and also look at how we can create them oursevles for our own application.

Feb 19, 2021

Stack And Register Machines

Last week we looked at CPython and mentioned that the interpretor was a stack based virtual machine. In today’s post we will go into more details why we mentioned that the VM was stack based by looking at the dissassembled Bytecode and compare it with a assembly code runnable on a register machine.

Feb 12, 2021

Python Compiler And Interpreter

Last week we looked at how compilers worked in general. We saw that they were mostly composed of two parts, the front end and back end. The front end being the compiler from programming source code to intermediate representation and the back end being the runtime. In today’s post we will look specifically into how Python gets compiled and interpreted with the default implementation, CPython.

Feb 05, 2021

How Do Compilers Work

With the recent introduction of Apple M1 chip, we have seen the start of the adoption of the ARM processor architecture for Apple Macbook line. ARM being a different family of instruction set architecture than x86 (most common as of today), this means that any application built for x86 (for Mac with Intel or AMD chips) needs to be recompiled to run on ARM (M1 chip). The process of compilation is a multistep process starting taking code written in programming languages and transforming it into machine code understood by the processor. In today’s post we will look at the different part involved in the compilation process.

Jan 29, 2021

Rebasing Merges With Git

Few weeks ago we talked about Git Rebase. We saw how we could use it to manipulate the history of branches. By default, rebasing would flatten all merge commits making the history linear. In today’s post we will see how we can rebase while keeping merge commits.

Jan 22, 2021

Git Stash

The stash is the place where we can save work in progress from working tree and index while reverting to the HEAD commit, a command useful to pull latest on the checkout branch or simply inspect other branches. In this post we will look at how to use git stash.

Jan 15, 2021

Git Log

Git log is a command used to look at the commit logs. It’s a useful command to look at the history of a repository, the different commits, the different merges or even the repository graph. In today’s post we will look at few example where git log can be used.

Jan 08, 2021

Difference Between Working Tree And Index In Git

In few of our previous posts, we referred to the HEAD, working tree and index when dealing with Git. In today’s post we will look at what those mean with example.

Jan 01, 2021

Git Cherry Pick

Git cherry-pick is a command used to apply changes from an existing commit. In this post we’ll look at some example where cherry picking can be useful.

Dec 25, 2020

Git Difftool And Mergetool With Visual Studio Code

Visual Code ships with powerful Git support. In this post we will look at how we can use Visual Code as default diff and merge tool for Git.

Dec 18, 2020

Git Reset

Git reset is a command used to reset the current HEAD to a specified state. Common scenarios of using git reset are for clearing unstaged changes, reverting a staged commit or simply reverting a commit made by mistake back to the working tree. In this post we’ll look at Git reset with examples.

Dec 11, 2020

Git Diff Triple Dot And Double Dot

When using a branching mechanism like GitFlow or Mainline, we usually create pull request from short lived branches to long lived branches (e.g. develop, master). The pull request diff page gives a view of the changes that were brought by the branch. By default all repositories managers like GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket uses “triple dot” diff to show diff. In this post we’ll look at the difference between “triple dot” and “double dot” diff.

Dec 04, 2020

Git Diff

Git Diff is a command used to look at changes between two revisions. The revision can be directly looked by branch tip, tag or commit hash. In this post we will look at the different usages of git diff and how to read the output.

Nov 27, 2020

Git Rebase

Git Rebase is a command used to reapply commits on top of another base tip. The base tip could be either another branch or the current branch. Rebase is useful in scenarios where we need to keep branches up to date with long lived branches or scenarios where we want to rework the history of a feature branch. In this week blog post we will look at different scenarios where Git Rebase is useful and understand the usage of the command with its parameters.

Nov 20, 2020

Kafka Log Compaction

Kakfa supports multiple log cleanup policy, delete or compact. When set to delete, log segments will be deleted when the size or time limit is reached. When compact is set, Kafka will ensure to keep at least the latest value of messages per message key. With log compaction setup on a Kafka topic, the topic becomes a database where messages are rows in database term, mutation of rows are done via messages where the last message received represents the latest state. In this post we will see how we can setup compaction and the different settings that affect its behaviour.