I think we all love Postgres. It's fast, efficient, and free to use. Nowadays, when I'm thinking of creating a SQL database, I choose Postgres as my primary target. For local development, I pretty much always deploy it in a Docker container, but the question is—how do you access it? Some people use database management interfaces built into IDEs, some use dedicated tools (such as pgAdmin or DBeaver), but for my basic development needs, I stick with psql (and it's in the terminal!). In this article, I'll show you the common useful things you can do with it.

Prerequisites:

• Basic SQL understanding
• Terminal

In summer of 2024 I went to Turkey for summer holidays. We were in Alanya and unfortunately (or fortunately) the WiFi was pricey. Not only that, but given that we were in the Asian part of Turkey, it meant that my mobile internet was simply not working. This made my phone regress entirely to... being a phone again.

During my high school years, I strongly disliked "Polish Language and Literature" classes. I thought they were boring and couldn't understand why poets and writers overthought and elaborated on even the simplest of things. Naturally, back then, I couldn't even fathom changing my mind. It is, therefore, very surprising to me that I now find myself not only enjoying reading short poems but also writing them, albeit terribly..

In this article I will showcase you a recent trick I've learned when glancing through boto3 source code. There was a particular class which name was even stranger than its usage: ForgetfulDict. We'll break down its surprisingly simple implementation, understand the specific problem it solves within Python's copy module, and see how this pattern can be useful in other contexts.

Prerequisites:

• Basic Python understanding

My TL over at STX has given me a good self-improvement idea - for every book I've read, I should write something about it. It can be some kind of side project that uses the ideas from the book or a blog post summarising it. In this series, I am going to do a little bit of both. Going over the most interesting points to me that I've got to known thanks to said book, as well as try (more or less) use it practically.

The book we put on the spot as a first one is (one that I've read most recently since hearing mentioned advice) - Rust Atomics and Locks by Mara Bos. Mara is an excellent engineer, current Rust library team dev and a fantastic writer. You can get to know her more on one of following websites:

• Blog - can not recommend that one enough!
• Bluesky
• Twitter
• Link to a book

Since I am not a book reviewer, I don't exactly know how to conduct one, so I am going to approach it how I see it make most sense - going chapter by chapter. This article is for those who are not yet sure if this book is worth a read (spoiler - it is) and is mainly targeted for someone interested in a little bit lower level of concurrency, with a sprinkle of Rust, than what's usually used. We rarely, if ever, write these structures ourselves.