Blogs

Offline retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)

GitHub Copilot was my first experience with generative artificial intelligence (AI). I was impressed by its ability to make code suggestions and to generate unit tests. Translation …

OAuth and PKCE

OAuth is a common mechanism used to communicate with APIs and its Authorization Code Grant is the most-used grant type. In writing a CLI application to talk to these APIs, the …

Bubble Tea

My software development work is mostly done in a terminal. So I suppose it is natural that most of my tools are using a command-line interface. Besides writing bash scripts, there …

gum

I have been a full-time vim user for 5 years. Naturally, I’m also a heavy command line user and, even more naturally, I automate most of my workflows using commands in bash (sorry …

More thoughts on Mastodon

This post is more like a continuation of Another social media app - Mastodon I wrote back in early November 2022. As of the time of writing, I have been on Mastodon (hachyderm.io) …

Another social media app - Mastodon

Legacy social media apps Twitter and Facebook were my go-to social media apps back 10 years ago. I started using Facebook 2008 (yes, I was late to the party) and I connected to …

Git rebase with dependent branches

git rebase is always an important part of my workflow. As a maintainer of repositories at work, browsing commit history of a major part of my work. Thus, keeping the history …

vim

I have been actively using vim (technically neovim) for development at work and at home for almost 4 years (and was switching between between vim and atom the year before). I like …

Hugo

It’s been a while since a write a blog post… It’s been 10 years. My passion on software development didn’t diminish in any way but I switched to making more notes than writing a …

AJAX on Google App Engine

Continuing my last week’s exploration, I started to do something a little bit more than things in the Getting Started tutorial. The tutorial basically shows the way to do …

Initial Throughts on Google App Engine

I got some time this weekend to experience what cloud computing is all about. There are a few well-known “infrastructures” you can utilise at this moment, including Microsoft …

Using embedded resources in embedded javascript files in ASP.NET

Embedding javascript files in an ASP.NET assembly is very convenient for deployment since no extra copying is required. This is especially useful when the javascript file is part …

Creating ASP.NET controls with jQuery and MS AJAX (for MS AJAX dummies)

After reading an interesting tutorial from Janko about How to create Skype-like buttons using jQuery, I decided to wrap his javascript code, style sheets and HTML markups into an …

Javascript Syntax

Javascript is easy to write. I guess no one will disagree. Should you have some experiences in coding javascript, you may find coding in Javascript is error prone and is hard to …

Welcome

Hi all, I’m alex. I’m going to blog about some programming or configuration tips in this blog. Here is a little bit about my background. I’m now working as a .NET programmer and on …