[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

Connect Chromecast to a wifi with 2-step sign-in

A Chromecast doesn't support signing in to a wifi that requires you to sign in through a browser. You can imagine most hotels are using this kind of wifis. A wifi with 2-step sign-in is probably using a MAC address as an identifier. Therefore, a way

When high quality conflicts with solving user needs

Imagine you go to the DMV. The DMV has a waiting time of 3 hours. One employee walks up to you and says "oh well hey we have a new beta program for you, and you'll only need to wait 1 minute instead of 3 hours."

The best way to use Svelte with Play Framework

When building a web application on Playframework, there is no good way to integrate a JS framework like Svelte. The only way is to run Play and run the npm watch in 2 separate terminals. One is to build the backend code, and the other is to build the frontend

An open-sourced Ruby DSL for composing maintainable analytical SQL statements

Repository: https://github.com/tanin47/lilit-sql At the company I work at, we are building an analytics product on top of Presto, which supports SQL as its interface. We have a lot of long SQL statements to power charts, tables, and CSVs. When I say long, a final SQL

Analyze log files with SQL using Superintendent.app

I've launched Superintendent.app 6 months ago. Initially, I built it to make me more productive at work since I work with a lot of CSV files, and I loathe using Excel. After building it, I've realized that having a Desktop app that can handle GBs

Use SQL instead of Spreadsheet/Excel

Since starting at a new company, I've been working on an accounting report that comes in the form of CSVs, so I've worked with a lot of CSVs. As a person who knows SQL well but isn't good at Excel, working with CSV files

A programmable tooltip on Mac OS

Several months back, I've started a new job and immediately found myself perform some repetitive micro-workflows like: * Copying an ID, pasting it on the browser URL's bar, typing some url, and hitting enter * Copying a millisecond-from-epoch number, visiting a website that can convert

Edgecases for timezones

Even if we use a great timezone library like tzinfo, a bug might still happen. That's exactly what happened to me. I was building a graph whose x axis is of day frequency. Our database stored data in UTC. Since I wanted the days to be in accordance

The tale of Algolia's Scala client and Play Framework

Yesterday I've spent 5 hours debugging a strange issue when using the Algolia's Scala client with Playframework during local development. That is, the period where auto-reloading happens when code is changed. For a long time (~9 months), we've experienced a DNS error "