Hey what's up guys👋🏻 Remember our last Perfect Circle challenge? We had some amazing attempts! While...

In the fast-moving world of cryptocurrency, market data changes every second — prices fluctuate, trades execute, and volumes shift continuously. Capturing this stream of real-time data and transforming it into meaningful insights requires a robust and scalable pipeline. In this project, I built a complete real-time crypto market data pipeline that captures, streams, stores, and visualizes live data from Binance using PostgreSQL, Debezium, Kafka, JDBC, and Grafana. The goal was to design an architecture that not only moves data instantly between systems but also keeps it queryable and monitorable in real time. What began as a simple Binance data extractor evolved into a production-grade CDC (Change Data Capture) workflow capable of detecting every database change, streaming it through Kafka, storing it in a sink database, and visualizing it live on Grafana dashboards.

Apple’s revamped Siri is more than a voice assistant; it’s now the backbone of the iPhone user experience. You can try it now through the iOS 27 public beta.

When an autonomous agent gets an email address of its own, the first question your security team asks isn't "can it send mail?" It's "can you prove, six months from now, exactly what it said and to whom?" That's a different problem from "does it work." A demo that fires off a few support replies looks great in a sprint review. But the moment a real customer says "your bot promised me a refund," or a regulator asks for the complete record of what an automated system told a data subject, you need a defensible trail — an immutable record of every outbound and inbound message the agent touched, captured outside the mailbox the agent can also delete from. I work on the Nylas CLI, so the terminal commands below are the exact ones I reach for. But the architectural point here is provider-agnostic and it's the part most "AI email" tutorials skip: the live mailbox is not your audit log. It's mutable, it has retention limits, and the same agent that sends mail can also trash it. If your only record of what the agent did lives in the inbox, you don't have an audit trail — you have a working copy. What "audit-log everything" actually means There are two stores in this design, and keeping them separate is the whole point. The live mailbox — the Agent Account grant. Messages flow in and out here. It's queryable, it's real-time, and it's mutable . Flags change, messages move folders, things get trashed. On the free plan it's also retention-limited: 30 days for the inbox, 7 days for spam. The audit store — your system. An append-only, write-once log keyed by message_id and thread_id . Nothing in it is ever updated or deleted in normal operation. This is the record you hand a reviewer. The audit store is the thing you build. Nylas gives you the two capture points — the send response and the inbound webhook — but the immutability is your responsibility. That means a WORM (write-once-read-many) object store, an append-only table with no UPDATE / DELETE grant for the app role, or a has

Rendering a big image on iOS is one of those things that looks trivial until your app gets killed by the OS mid-export. CGContext , draw, makeImage() , done — except the moment the output gets large, that innocent-looking pipeline quietly asks for gigabytes of RAM and iOS terminates you. I hit this wall building Mozary , an iOS app that packs 100+ photos into a single giant picture (a photo mosaic). In v1.1.0 I finally killed the "high-resolution export crashes with out-of-memory" bug for good. The fix: stop putting the canvas in RAM at all. Put it in a memory-mapped file and let the OS page it to disk. RAM usage dropped from "4.8 GB, please die" to a few dozen MB, flat, regardless of output size. This post is the walkthrough — with the actual Swift. If you've ever seen Core Graphics blow up on a big image (mosaics, collages, stitched panoramas, high-res rendering — same trap), this is for you. TL;DR A non-compressed bitmap costs 4 bytes/pixel . A 1.2-gigapixel image = ~4.8 GB of RAM just for the canvas. CGContext(data: nil, ...) allocates that in RAM. context.makeImage() then copies it again . Double death. Back the canvas with a memory-mapped file ( mmap ). Writes transparently page out to disk and don't count against your app's memory footprint . Wrap that same mapping in a CGImage via CGDataProvider — zero copy — and stream it straight to a JPEG on disk. Never call makeImage() . Decode source tiles at their draw size , not full size. Because you now spend disk instead of RAM: add a free-space pre-flight check and clean up temp files after a crash. Let's dig in. The problem: "compressed file size" is a lie about memory Mozary lays photos out on a grid. A typical high-res export is a 200 × 267 grid with each tile drawn at 150px : width: 200 × 150 = 30,000 px height: 267 × 150 = 40,050 px That's ~1.2 gigapixels . Here's the part people underestimate: the final JPEG is only a few hundred MB to ~2 GB because JPEG is compressed . But while you're drawing, the canvas i

Most multi-tenant SaaS apps that send email do it from one shared identity. There's a notifications@yourapp.com , every customer's mail flows through it, and the tenant is just a from_name you stamp on the subject line or a footer you swap out. That's fine until it isn't — until Tenant A's spam complaints drag down Tenant B's deliverability, until a reply from a customer lands in a single firehose inbox you now have to fan back out, until one tenant wants a stricter send cap than another and you realize you built none of that into the data model. So let's not share. Let's give every tenant its own real mailbox — a dedicated Agent Account per customer, each with its own grant_id , its own send identity, its own policy and limits, grouped into its own workspace. Not one inbox with a thousand label hacks. A thousand inboxes, isolated by construction. I work on the Nylas CLI, so the terminal commands below are the exact ones I reach for when I'm wiring this up. Every step gets the two-angle tour: the raw curl call and the nylas command that does the same thing. Why per-tenant beats one shared sender The shared-sender model fails along a few predictable seams. Per-tenant Agent Accounts close each one: Deliverability blast radius. When everyone sends from one address, one tenant's bounce rate and spam complaints poison the reputation everyone shares. Per-tenant accounts — and, if you want, per-tenant domains — keep one customer's bad behavior from sinking the rest. Inbound that actually belongs to someone. A shared sender means replies come back to one mailbox and you're left correlating them to tenants by hand. When each tenant has its own grant, an inbound message.created event already carries the grant_id . The routing is done before your handler runs. Per-tenant policy and limits. Different customers, different rules. A trial tenant capped at a low daily send; an enterprise tenant with a higher quota and longer retention. With a shared sender you'd build all of that y

Most teams test email by not testing it. The send path gets a mock — expect(transport.send).toHaveBeenCalledWith(...) — and everyone agrees that's "good enough." The receive path gets skipped entirely, because there's no honest way to assert on a real inbox from a test runner. So the one part of your system that talks to the outside world over an unreliable, asynchronous, third-party channel is the part with the least coverage. That's backwards. The reason email is hard to test isn't the sending. It's the asserting . You can fire POST /messages/send all day, but to prove the message actually left, rendered correctly, and arrived with the body you expected, you need a real mailbox you control — one you can read programmatically and throw away when the run finishes. Shared Gmail test accounts almost get you there, but they bring OAuth on the runner, catch-all races between parallel workers, and a 90-day token that expires the night before a release. This post is about a different fixture: a disposable Agent Account created at the start of a CI run and deleted at the end. You mint a real mailbox per run (or per test), point your application at it, send and receive real mail, assert on the actual message body, and tear the whole thing down. No OAuth. No shared inbox. No leftover state. What an Agent Account gives you here An Agent Account is just a Nylas grant with a grant_id . That's the whole trick, and it's worth saying plainly because it's what makes this pattern cheap: an Agent Account works with every grant-scoped endpoint you already know — Messages, Drafts, Threads, Folders, Attachments, Webhooks. There's nothing new to learn on the data plane . If you've ever called GET /v3/grants/{grant_id}/messages , you already know how to read a test inbox. The difference from a normal grant is provisioning. A regular grant needs a real human to complete an OAuth flow. An Agent Account is created with a single API call — no OAuth screen, no refresh token, no human. It's a m

Most "AI email agent" demos quietly assume the agent answers everything. Point a model at the inbox, generate a reply, send it, repeat. That's a fine loop right up until the model hits a message it shouldn't touch — an angry customer, a legal question, a refund the agent has no authority to approve — and confidently fires off a reply anyway. The expensive failures in agent email aren't the threads the agent gets wrong. They're the threads the agent answers at all when it should have stepped back. So let's build the part that steps back. Not the classifier that decides a message is risky — that's triage , a separate problem. This is the handoff : once something flags a thread as "needs a human," how do you actually pull the whole conversation out of the agent's reach, park it where a person can find it, and make sure the agent keeps its hands off until that person clears it? I work on the Nylas CLI, so the terminal commands below are the exact ones I reach for when I wire up an escalation path. Every operation gets the two-angle tour: the raw curl call and the nylas command that does the same thing. What the handoff actually needs An Agent Account is, underneath, just a Nylas grant with a grant_id . That's the spine of everything here, and it's worth sitting with: there is nothing new to learn on the data plane. The same grant-scoped endpoints you already use — Messages, Threads, Folders, Drafts — work against this grant exactly the way they work against any Gmail or Microsoft grant you got through OAuth. So the escalation path isn't some special agent feature. It's three plain operations you already half-know: A place to put escalated threads. A custom folder — call it Needs human — that lives alongside the six system folders every Agent Account ships with ( inbox , sent , drafts , trash , junk , archive ). A way to move the whole thread there. Not one message — the thread . A reply is just the latest message in a conversation; a reviewer needs the full chain. A way

Most "AI email agent" demos end with a triumphant send . The model writes a reply, the code POSTs it, and a real message lands in a real stranger's inbox. That's a great demo and a terrible production default. The moment your agent can send mail with nobody watching, you've handed an LLM a corporate email address and the standing authority to use it. One hallucinated price, one confidently wrong refund promise, one apology to the wrong customer, and you're explaining to legal why a bot signed an email as your company. There's a boring, durable fix that predates AI by decades: don't send — draft. Stage the message, put a human in front of it, and only send once someone with a name and a pulse approves. Email systems have had a "Drafts" folder forever for exactly this reason. The Nylas Drafts API turns that folder into something better — an approval queue your agent writes into and your reviewers drain. This post builds that queue. The agent creates a draft, a human reviews the pending drafts, and an approved draft gets sent byte-for-byte unchanged . No re-rendering, no "the agent regenerates it on approval" race where the thing you approved isn't the thing that ships. I work on the Nylas CLI, so the terminal commands below are the exact ones I reach for, and I'll pair every one with the raw curl so you can wire it into a backend in whatever language you like. This is deliberately not about escalating inbound threads to a human (that's a different problem, where the trigger is a message arriving). Here the trigger is the agent wanting to send , and the gate sits on the outbound path. Why a draft is the right approval primitive You could build approval a dozen ways. You could buffer the agent's output in a queue table and call send later. You could stash a JSON blob in Redis. Both work, and both quietly reinvent something the email stack already gives you. A draft is a real, persisted email object , on the mailbox, with a stable id . That buys you three things a homegr

DoorDash RAG Architecture, AI Agent Mesh, & Open-Source Supply-Chain Scanner Today's Highlights This week, we explore advanced AI agent orchestration, a detailed production RAG architecture, and an open-source tool for supply-chain security auditing. These stories provide practical insights into deploying and managing AI frameworks in real-world workflows. How DoorDash Built an AI Shopping Assistant That Doesn’t Rely on the LLM Alone (InfoQ) Source: https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/07/doordash-ai-ask-assistant/?utm_campaign=infoq_content&utm_source=infoq&utm_medium=feed&utm_term=global This article from InfoQ delves into the intricate architecture behind DoorDash's "Ask DoorDash" AI-powered shopping assistant. Unlike many solutions that solely depend on large language models, DoorDash's approach integrates an LLM with a complex retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system and a comprehensive intent classification pipeline. This multi-layered framework ensures accuracy and relevance, particularly for tasks like recommending specific items or answering detailed product queries within their extensive catalog. The system also employs sophisticated filtering and ranking mechanisms to refine results, moving beyond simple keyword matching to provide highly personalized and context-aware suggestions. The technical deep-dive covers how DoorDash engineered this system to handle the nuances of user intent and data retrieval efficiently in a production environment. Key aspects include leveraging structured and unstructured data sources, managing latency for real-time interactions, and implementing robust feedback loops for continuous improvement. The article offers valuable insights into building scalable, reliable AI assistants that can augment LLMs with proprietary data and business logic, providing a blueprint for enterprises looking to deploy similar advanced applied AI solutions. Comment: This provides a fantastic real-world case study for augmenting LLMs with custom RAG and

DuckDB Iceberg MERGE, PostgreSQL GUCs, SQLite Optimization Checklist Today's Highlights This week's highlights include powerful new Iceberg data manipulation features in DuckDB v1.5.3 and a deep dive into an obscure PostgreSQL GUC. Plus, the SQLite community discusses a practical optimization checklist for embedded databases. New DuckDB-Iceberg Features in v1.5.3 (DuckDB Blog) Source: https://duckdb.org/2026/05/29/new-iceberg-features.html The latest DuckDB v1.5.3 release significantly enhances its integration with Apache Iceberg, introducing a suite of powerful new features for data engineers and analysts. Key among these are the support for MERGE INTO and ALTER TABLE statements, allowing for more robust data manipulation directly within DuckDB for Iceberg tables. This update enables complex operations like upserting data based on conditions, schema evolution (e.g., adding/dropping columns), and modifying table properties, all achievable through a familiar SQL environment. This capability is crucial for maintaining data integrity and adapting schemas without complex external tooling. Furthermore, DuckDB-Iceberg now supports partition transforms, making it easier to manage and query partitioned Iceberg datasets efficiently by defining how data is distributed across files. The release also brings support for Iceberg V3, ensuring compatibility with the latest features of the Iceberg format, including new manifest list and manifest file layouts which offer performance improvements. These additions position DuckDB as an even stronger tool for building performant data pipelines and performing complex analytics directly on large-scale Iceberg data lakes, fully leveraging DuckDB's in-process analytical capabilities and the flexibility of the Iceberg table format. Comment: This update is a game-changer for working with Iceberg tables directly in DuckDB. MERGE INTO support means simplified ETL for incremental loads, and V3 compatibility ensures we're ready for future Iceberg

We all hear about "Not comparing yourself to others" and that "comparing yourself is the thief of joy". To be honest, I agree and it's strange that I am contradicting myself because I compare myself A LOT. The more I looked into it, the more I realized that we have a natural tendency to compare ourselves. It's a human thing to do. The issue is that we tend to be very excessive over comparing ourselves to others to the point where it takes a toll on us. For example, we are demotivated to see someone's success because we believe we can't reach the goal they are in. We all have jealousy. Big or small. Even where I am at right now, I am still jealous that many people I know that got into big tech companies like Microsoft. To get more context, I want to share a story with you. Story Time Back in the day, I remember it was the year of the ACT. For those who don't know: It's a Standardized test that is needed for the college admissions to determine if you are admitted to their program. I remember I got a national average of 21 as my composite score and I was proud of the score I got since it's the national average during that time. However, I remember the day where my friends talked about the ACT. The most common thing I heard was: "Oh I got a 30" "I got a 32" "Man I got a 35, it was sooo easy" Hearing that makes me feel not only bummed out, but felt left out. I was feeling that I wasn't smart enough to be in the group. What's worse is that they got accepted into colleges and programs that are well known. Then they start boasting about their accomplishments. I felt like I am the odd-one-out because of my scores and their accomplishments I could not match. Why am I Talking about this? Looking back and knowing where they are at now, I am proud of who I become today. It's not that they have fallen downhill (they are still successful), but the route they have taken that I definitely could not follow. For example, on GitHub, many people fill up their contribution graphs to the

The ScyllaDB PHP driver is not a C++ extension anymore. As of 1.4.0 it's pure C23, the ZendCPP template layer we leaned on for the object embed and allocate pattern is deleted, and the build no longer needs a C++ compiler at all. Every hand-written .cpp file is a .c file now (71 of them), the descriptor generator emits .c , and CMake builds with c_std_23 and nothing else. That's the biggest change to how this extension is built since we forked it for PHP 8.0. This is also the release where a plan I opened back in 2023 finally landed. PR #50 laid it out: rewrite the src/Cluster directory to be more maintainable, use Zend Fast Argument Parsing, remove some memory allocations, and add .stub.php files that generate the C headers so nobody has to hand-maintain Zend arginfo by hand. 1.4.0 is that plan finished, and a lot more that grew out of it. The things you'll actually feel: persistent session connect() doesn't allocate a 200-character key string on every call anymore, and the minimum PHP is now 8.3 (8.2 is gone). Nothing in your application code changes, this is almost all under the surface. The .stub.php Build The idea from PR #50 was small. Instead of writing ZEND_BEGIN_ARG_INFO_EX blocks by hand and keeping them in sync with the actual method bodies, write the signature once in a .stub.php file and generate the C arginfo from it. In v1.4.0 that's the whole build. There are 75 .stub.php files now, and each one is just the PHP signature of the class: // src/Keyspace.stub.php interface Keyspace { public function name (): string ; public function replicationClassName (): string ; /** @return array<string, mixed> */ public function replicationOptions (): array ; public function hasDurableWrites (): bool ; /** @return Table|false */ public function table ( string $name ): Table | false ; public function aggregate ( string $name , mixed ... $types ): Aggregate | false ; } At build time CMake runs gen_stub.php (vendored from PHP 8.5's build/gen_stub.php , with two small p

This is a condensed version of my preprint ( DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21345310 , CC BY 4.0). Reference implementation: askbar.pro . The library problem For thirty years the website has been a library: a visitor arrives with one question and is expected to find the answer themselves, navigating menus, pages, and filters. Visitors read a small fraction of site content. Most leave without doing the thing the site owner hoped for. Chat widgets bolted onto such sites change nothing: the maze remains, the widget just answers questions about the maze. The pattern The Librarian Pattern inverts the relationship. The site does not present itself; it asks what you need and assembles the answer. The bar as the primary interface. One persistent input, text and hold-to-talk voice. It replaces navigation. Scene reassembly (generative UI). The center of the screen is not a page but a scene, composed per recognized intent. Transitions morph rather than reload. A guide with a plan. The conversational layer is a consultant with a goal ladder, asking one next question, never presenting menus of three options. Two button systems. Global suggestion chips above the bar are visually separated from in-scene action cards. This prevents the "six buttons" degeneration of chat UIs. The static shadow. Every live scene has a server-rendered twin page: full text in the DOM, question-shaped headings, FAQ schema, llms.txt, freshness stamps. Humans get the agent; crawlers and AI answer engines get complete, citable pages, generated from the same content source. Structural GEO-readiness. Content already organized as questions and answers matches how generative engines retrieve and cite, by construction. The result that surprised me 24 hours after the discoverability layer went public, Yandex Alice (the largest Russian AI answer engine) began citing the reference implementation as its prime example for the "next-generation website" query, describing the mechanics correctly and distinguishing it from "a chat