Pirobits, engineering and product notes

I share my experiences and learnings in creating products, from the perspective of a software engineer.

Recent posts

Message queue using MySQL: SELECT * FOR UPDATE

Writing a queuing system does not have to involve using complex software or writing hundreds of lines of code. In this post I want to explain how using a simple MySQL table and a terminal you can make a queuing system, which you can then implement in any language.

Alberto Sola·4/29/2024·6 min 🍿

Phi3 vs Llama3: the new generation LLMs

The new language models such as Phi3 for me are a revolution because being much smaller has several advantages: they are faster, therefore cheaper, and you can run them on virtually any platform.

Alberto Sola·4/26/2024·3 min 🍿

MySQL: ENUM Datatype

Today I discovered that MySQL has a data type which is an ENUM. It allows you to define up to 2^16 or 65536 different values. The peculiarity is that you can define a set of values such as “status” => “pending”, “wip”, “done”, and MySQL itself converts them into values 1, 2, 3... Important: the values start at 1 and not 0. Note that it can have either a DEFAULT value or it can be NULL and in this case, if it is not defined, the field value will be NULL.

Alberto Sola·4/24/2024·1 min 🍿

How to make presentations with Reveal.js (HTML, JS and CSS)

Looking for the best tool to create presentations, I'll tell you why I chose Reveal.js over other tools like PowerPoint.

Alberto Sola·4/22/2024·4 min 🍿

My working setup: adding acoustic treatment

One of the things I have always done is to progressively improve my setup. In the last few months I have improved the quality with which I record videos: both image and sound. And don't think that you need a lot of money for this: my equipment for recording videos is very cheap and I'm happy with the result.

Alberto Sola·4/16/2024·3 min 🍿

Solving Sudokus with backtracking in Python

Sudokus is something that has always caught my attention and, when I learnt about backtracking during my degree in computer engineering, in the artificial intelligence subjects, I came up with the idea of solving sudokus using this method.

Alberto Sola·4/15/2024·5 min 🍿

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