Alexis Hope ENGINEERING & DESIGN NOTES

Infrastructure

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WASM Tooling — A Practical Cheat Sheet

#WASM#WebAssembly#Rust#Go#TinyGo

The WebAssembly ecosystem has accumulated a solid set of command-line tools that don’t get surfaced well in most introductory material. Tutorials tend to focus on one language path — Rust via wasm-pack, or Go, or Emscripten — and leave the broader toolchain unexplained. This is a …

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Nim's Garbage Collection — From Automatic to None

#Nim#GarbageCollection#ARC#ORC#Systems

One of the things that drew me to Nim is the degree of control it offers over memory management without forcing you to the extreme of a borrow checker. The default experience is a garbage-collected language that feels like Python. The far end of the dial is manual memory …

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Static Images Are Losing the Engagement Battle

#Cloudinary#DAM#UX#Ecommerce#Media

There is a measurable cost to serving static images. Not a performance cost — that’s a different conversation, one I covered in an earlier post on Cloudinary as a DAM. This is an engagement cost: the gap between what a user feels when they interact with a product image and what …

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Simulating Colour Blindness with ImageMagick

#ImageMagick#Accessibility#DataViz#Colour#Design

Colour blindness affects roughly 8% of men and 0.5% of women with Northern European ancestry. For a data visualisation that uses colour as the primary encoding — a choropleth, a multi-series line chart, a heatmap — that’s a meaningful share of the audience for whom the visual may …

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Percona Toolkit for Managing MySQL Clusters

#MySQL#Percona#Database#Replication#Infrastructure

Running a MySQL cluster in production eventually teaches you that MySQL’s built-in tooling is optimised for the happy path. Replication works, until it doesn’t. Schema changes are fast, until the table has 80 million rows. SHOW SLAVE STATUS reports lag, but the number isn’t …

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