Posts

After the privacy related changes to WhatsApp, a lot of people are fleeing this popular chat application for other more privacy-aware choices. This development, made me consider Signal, again, as a chat service, but my decision to install it and try to move my contacts was not a privacy related one. In Greece where me and most of my contacts live, WhatsApp isn’t as popular as Facebook’s Messenger, an app that lacks end-to-end encryption and as a result is considerably worse privacy-wise. ...

You want to create a blog to start sharing some thoughts, ideas or projects. But when you want to post something, you don’t want to think a lot about the underlying software, and you definitely don’t want to mess with lots of settings, buttons, designs and properties. If you are a major procrastinator like me, every little configurable setting or element, can be a reason to “think it over again”, “start writing some other day”, “need more time” and more excuses for not finishing or even starting your blog post. ...

TLDR; I created a small npm package that acts as a wrapper around node-fetch, and returns the same promise for the same request, until it resolves. You can visit the repo of this package here. Below, I explain my motivation, and how I tackled the issue. So here’s the scenario: You have a system that interfaces with a really slow third-party API. User Bob, needs some data, so your system performs a request to the third-party API, and waits for a response. In the meantime, user Alice needs the same date and the system performs the same request to the API on behalf of her. Both users are now waiting for two requests that the only difference they have, is the execution time. ...