Speaking to students

Given there is a chance, I'm eager to give a tech talk to any kind of audience which is willing to have a listen. Part of the fun of giving a speech is of course also learning something about the subject and also, improving myself as a speaker.

Two of the most recent talks I've held this year have been to the local university IT students. Having been one of them in the past, I knew that giving them something uninspiring to do would be something they are used to. The challenge would be to figure out something actually fun which can be accomplished in a matter of a couple of hours.

There are countless blog posts and tutorials about how to talk to students, but I decided to ignore them and wing it.

I gave two assignments to choose from. First one was to make a DVD screen saver with JS. There was a short-lived internet meme about it earlier this year, and I thought that hey this could be fun. It turned out to be quite amusing to watch at least especially when mixed with the second assignment which was to program a simple music loop with SonicPI.

I am not a fluent and a confident speaker, and because of that, I usually avoid trying to be funny. That does not mean that the subject of my talk or in this case the technical assignments should be boring. Personally, I dislike the usual pure algorithmic challenges merely because they are everywhere: in interviews, homework, language examples, etc.

Last week, I demoed my working style in an adult education course where the students with previous IT background catch up with modern web and mobile technologies. Together with my colleague, we created a simple voting system for the parliamentary elections this spring. Contrary to the earlier presentation, here the subject was rather dull, but that redirected the focus to my daily routines. The discussion and questions were directed towards my tech choices (in this case, Nuxtjs) and not to the domain which was beside the point.

Comments

RocksDB data recovery

I recently needed to do some maintenance on a RocksDB key-value store. The task was simple enough, just delete some keys as the db served as a cache and did not contain any permanent data. I used the RocksDB cli administration tool ldb to erase the keys. After running a key scan with it, I got this error Failed: Corruption: Snappy not supported or corrupted Snappy compressed block contents So a damaged database. Fortunately, there's a tool to fix it, and after running it, I had access to the db via the admin tool. All the data was lost though. Adding and removing keys worked fine but all the old keys were gone. It turned out that the corrupted data was all the data there was. The recovery tool made a backup folder, and I recovered the data by taking the files from the backup folder and manually changing the CURRENT file to point to the old MANIFEST file which is apparently how RocksDB knows which sst (table) files to use. I could not access the data with the admin tool, ...

I'm not a passionate developer

A family friend of mine is an airlane pilot. A dream job for most, right? As a child, I certainly thought so. Now that I can have grown-up talks with him, I have discovered a more accurate description of his profession. He says that the truth about the job is that it is boring. To me, that is not that surprising. Airplanes are cool and all, but when you are in the middle of the Atlantic sitting next to the colleague you have been talking to past five years, how stimulating can that be? When he says the job is boring, it is not a bad kind of boring. It is a very specific boring. The "boring" you would want as a passenger. Uneventful. Yet, he loves his job. According to him, an experienced pilot is most pleased when each and every tiny thing in the flight plan - goes according to plan. Passengers in the cabin of an expert pilot sit in the comfort of not even noticing who is flying. As someone employed in a field where being boring is not exactly in high demand, this sounds pro...

PydanticAI + evals + LiteLLM pipeline

I gave a tech talk at a Python meetup titled "Overengineering an LLM pipeline". It's based on my experiences of building production-grade stuff with LLMs I'm not sure how overengineered it actually turned out. Experimental would be a better term as it is using PydanticAI graphs library, which is in its very early stages as of writing this, although arguably already better than some of the pipeline libraries. Anyway, here is a link to it. It is a CLI poker app where you play one hand against an LLM. The LLM (theoretically) gets better with a self-correcting mechanism based on the evaluation score from another LLM. It uses the annotated past games as an additional context to potentially improve its decision-making. https://github.com/juho-y/archipylago-poker

Koodihommia

Search This Blog