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Using Dart's extension types in vector_math

December 29, 2024

With Dart version 3.3, the Dart team released the new language feature extension types. Extension types wrap existing Dart types and allow you to add a custom interface with your own methods around them. This is especially useful for native types like DOM element. Since they are statically typed, they allow for further performance optimizations. vector_math is a wrapper around native float list types and I want to see if extension types can be useful to reduce overhead and improve performance of critical code.

Oliver Sand

Lessons learned from “just” replacing a CMS

July 2, 2024

Last year, I began the process of replacing the content management system (CMS) that powers this blog. This turned out to be a year-long journey in which I rewrote most of the blog. Surprisingly, little changed visually, as the changes happened behind the scenes. This experience serves as a reminder that projects can take a long time when you are navigating uncertainties and trying to do too much at once.

Oliver Sand

Range queries in Firestore

January 15, 2024

I like Firestore because it’s an easy-to-use database. Especially because it’s easy to build queries that are just fast. It’s designed to work at scale - by providing queries that have a constant time, regardless of the query conditions. But if you have worked with Firestore before, you will know that this limits the types of queries you can do. This can make range queries, for example for calendar applications, a challenge.

Oliver Sand

Scale re-orderable lists

December 31, 2023

Creating a UI where a user can manually reorder items based on their needs is neat, but can be quite challenging to implement in the backend. One need to store the order of the items somehow. There are different approaches to doing this, but each of them has trade-offs when it comes to performance and scalability. In this post I want to explain my scenario, compare them, and choose the best implementation.

Oliver Sand

Be careful with performance.measure

May 3, 2023

I recently helped a team improve the performance of one of their services. They had already invested some time, but over time the performance was getting even worse! Their Node.js service was suffering from slow response times. At some point, the team added performance tracing using performance.mark() and performance.measure() to understand why the response time was so long. Little did they know that this would make things even worse…

Oliver Sand

Tools for drawing diagrams in Markdown

January 19, 2023

Markdown is a great format. I use it a lot for documentation. It’s much easier to keep documentation up to date by keeping it close to the code. Sure, Markdown has limited formatting features, but it helps to focus on the essential part, the content. But there is one feature missing: Drawing diagrams.

Oliver Sand

Use kubernetes health checks without breaking your application

July 24, 2022

When working with Kubernetes, a question that will always come up is: “how to set up proper health checks”? The Kubernetes documentation provides some basic information about why you might want to use them and how you configure them. But, as with all things–it is a bit more complicated than that.

Dominik Henneke

react-beautiful-dnd is ugly

July 7, 2022

react-beautiful-dnd is a great package for building complex drag and drop behaviors of lists. If you want to reorder the items in a list or move them between lists, this is the go-to package. But the package has a problem: Atlassian has limited its maintenance to security fixes.

Oliver Sand

I have bad luck with Cypress

May 14, 2022

Testing is all about being confident that your changes to the software can be deployed to production without problems. While unit or integration tests help you to test details — like the results of a calculation, or whether two parts of your system are working together — you don’t know whether all parts of your system are working together as they should. Systems are getting ever more complex and we try to cope with that by splitting it up into parts so that we can handle them or distribute the complexity over multiple teams. Teams develop and deploy small, loosely coupled Microservices that reassemble a bigger system. How do you know that everything works together and that a user can use it? This is where End-to-end (e2e) testing comes into play. And Cypress can be a nice tool for that.

Oliver Sand

Draw a pattern along a path using SVG

April 2, 2022

Recently I wanted to create the effect of a cable for an application I’m working on. The cable should have a textile look, similar to a rope, which is quite common right now (for example the charging cable of the current MacBook Pro). I’m using SVG for rendering, so applying a pattern to a stroke path should be easy, right?

Oliver Sand