Finally, after spending a lot of time updating this website, and even more time bikeshedding about colors and spacing, it's finally ready. I have also decided to write more, I'll explain why in a bit.

Migrating to a new domain

So, on one fine day, I was chitchatting with gemini about why my old domain txds.me was not ranking properly in the Google's search results, even after I specifically told claude to "make sure my site is SEO optimized". It kind of did the job since I currently rank 5th if I search for txds on Google and that's nice for me being a nobody, and to be fair, txds isn't even really related to me in any way. It was just toxdes without vowels to get a shorter domain for my personal space on the internet.

Now why toxdes? well, I started using internet really late, so all the cool usernames that made sense were already taken everywhere, so I had to work with whatever was available at the time, and I have stuck with it ever since. Gemini also convinced me to use toxdes.com because nothing significant exists for this word. I also tried my firstname+lastname combo, but turns out my name is way too unfairly common than it should be, so here we are.

By the way, I also checked historical `whois` data, and found out that txds.me was registered at least 8 times in the past, and toxdes.com wasn't registered even once. It's a really nice tool.

The migration is pretty much complete, and moving forward I'll be exclusively using toxdes.com. I currently use Cloudflare to manage DNS records, and this website is also statically hosted on Cloudflare pages. I also host some of my historic personal projects on github pages and vercel under subdomains. Vercel's dashboard has a functionality to add *.toxdes.com domain, and setup redirects for*.txds.me to redirect to the newly added domain, so those were easy. I migrated from netlify to vercel for one old project, it was just easier to manage that way. And for the github pages site and the main txds.me domain, I am using Cloudflare's redirect rules.

Adding likes to blog posts

I've been learning about system design since forever, and I thought this might be a good idea to burn some tokens add a little bit of "server-side" state to this website.

We live in exciting times nowadays where realizing an idea is just few prompts away, I quickly ended up vibe-coding `counter as a service`. The goal was simple, adding "likes" to my posts. Within 2-4 prompts, I was able to get a multi-tenant counter backend server as a single binary which exposed some HTTP endpoints and synced state to the postgres database.

I also added a small in-memory LRU cache to do async updates to the postgres database, mainly because redis felt like an overkill. Perfect little solution for a perfectly little problem. I know it can be abused easily, and cannot really scale well, I'll hopefully improve it and make it a little bit more reliable as the time goes by, but for what it's worth, it's good enough for now.

Why write more

I always felt like I had nothing to share, and I'm not a good enough engineer to share non-trivial computer science things and with the recent advancements of LLMs, writing blogs felt actually pointless.

Recently, I also had a good chat with someone who smuggles decent engineers to startups and he told me "you're mid bruh". I mean it's true, to some extent, but man did it feel brutal. Anyway, I was weirded out when he asked why do you have only 2 blogs in three years, and I was like what's the point in writing trivial stuff. Anyway, the good takeaway from the chat was writing a tech blog was never about storming the frontier of advancement in computer science research, which feels strange now as I type it out, but it was exactly what I used to think - everything I ever knew about programming and computers always felt like explaining how to do add two numbers 6+7.

After the chat, and some pondering, I have had a change of heart, and I have decided to write more. I think I'll start writing whatever trivial things I know, or will learn next.

I think I'll start by writing about failing my Amazon's SDE-2 interviews.