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tanin

My secret productivity app when I worked at Stripe

The tool: ProgrammableTooltip.com (disclaimer: I'm the creator) Back in 2019, I just joined Stripe and worked on Billing Analytics. I was working the timezone part of it. Side note: daylight saving is insane. I found myself needing to convert epoch-from-millis to human-readable date extremely often when I

Set up IntelliJ to run scalatest's FunSpec

I finally set up IntelliJ to be able to run a FunSpec test. For so long, I didn't know why it didn't work until I embarked on a short journey to find out. My FunSpec test is often complex with set up code and layers of

The correct way to model a timestamp range is [start, end)

Or things that are not mathematically precise will cause you pain down the line.

Building the load more mechanism for an infinite scroll

Let's set up the problem first. You have a list of posts and you want to show them "infinite-scroll"-style sorting from the newest post to the oldest post. Well, obviously, you can't just load every single post into the page at once. Therefore,

Play Framework: Session's Gotchas

I've just switched our cookies to Play's Session. I was previously under the impression that "Session" is temporary, as in the stored value isn't persisted after the browser is closed. After looking closely at it, Play's Session is implemented using

Integrate JobRunr into Play Framework [Update Sep 2025]

💡This blog has been updated in Sep 2025 with new insights. new insights and updates * An example of using JobRunr is shown in PlayFast (an opinionated production-ready PlayFramework template that make you productive). * The admin dashboard can run on the same instance as the background server. We don't

A succinct early exit trick for Option in Scala

I've realised that return in Scala only apply to a method. This led me to a cool early exit trick that I use everywhere. It looks a bit off because I, for some reason, think return should have applied to the current lambda. But that's not

Java: Meridiem (am/pm) date parsing surprise

Our team was perplexed with the date parsing logic where it seemed we couldn't parse 11/19/2024 11:25 am or 11/19/2024 11:25 AM depending on the machine. I eventually decided to ask on Reddit's r/javahelp. It turns out that it

GraalVM and ChromeDriver in a Docker image for Render.com

This should work on Heroku or in any Docker-based deployment as well. Adding Chrome and ChromeDriver into a GraalVM Docker image isn't as straightforward as I thought. The main complication originates from the fact that GraalVM is lean. There are 2 problems from being lean: (1) microdnf as

[Deprecated] Integrate New Relic into Play Framework

💡Update on Oct 2025 My position is to pipe syslog to New Relic at the OS level instead of using the NewRelic agent, which is the approach described in this blog. The downside of using the NewRelic agent is that it doesn't capture exceptions and logs before the