Techstructive Weekly #56
More SQL learning, deep dives into reading articles about AI and software engineer philosophy, among the other things wrote, read, watched and learnt over the week from 17th to 23rd August 2025.
Week #56
A simple yet rewarding week. Continuing the learning path of SQL, and taking it to a next level with consistent posting of log like posts, reading a ton of hackernews articles, researching about AI generated images metadata, and a lot of python code.
I will try to take a break this weekend, try to think what I want to see myself in the next 5 years, 3 years, and 1 year. I really want to think what I am and want to be as a person. Thanks to the post that I read this week, also will continue with SQL lessons or even take a course or certification.
Quote of the week
“Being born is probably the most difficult thing we ever have to do. If you can survive the ordeal of being born, you can get through anything.”
— Michiko Aoyama
“What You Are Looking For Is in the Library”
This is such a great quote. It shows the meaning in birth. If you read the book, you’ll understand it much better. But TLDR is that you are in someone’s womb, you don’t know what is it to breathe, to open eyes, to cry, to feel your body, but still you move out of the womb and you are born. You faced the most non-deterministic thing. Now everything after that will be simple compared to that.
Similar is the situation of suicide or death feelings, if you are ready to give up and die, you have gone through everything and ready to get over the most dreadful things of life, death. If you had that feeling, you are at a much high tolerant level, everything else feels small and you could handle it, just hang in there, something beautiful might be coming your way.
Life is about extremes!
Wrote
Anyways, lets see what I took under the creation section for the week. Back to writing after a while. I will write things out, no matter how silly or existing crisis it feels. It is my thoughts, no AI shit, just simple old school learning.
Log SQL Day 0: Output dot command
I am also sharing it on Substack Notes, Twitter and Bluesky
Read
How to stop feeling lost in tech
This is a premium quality post. So much valuable advice for juniors and people who are all over the place and feeling overwhelmed or burned out.
What do you want to be in like 5 years, 3 years, 1 year? That hit me like a truck. I never think about the future, but still there needs to be specific I enjoy and would want to keep enjoying and learning. I know that's a too generic AI like answer but that is where the real friction will arise and I think we will emerge out of it with a fresh perspective. After having asked a lot of questions and having a better idea about our likes and dislikes, thinking without any pressure just gives us the opportunity to truly see beneath us.
I don't think the steps mentioned there are necessary, like I know this might be done for relaxing the user (taking leave in the middle of a week, going a entire day at the waffle-house or cafe). But the process is to the point.
Listing down the goals and what I want to be like a tree like structure, no cycles. Breaking down one goal from 5 year to 3, then 1 and then month and then weeks. That makes it really clear and forces us to double down on our true "calling" or the muse if you think in that way.
What makes a good software engineer
Curiosity to build the right thing, and being honest about it.
Trust is super valuable, I have experienced it working remotely at my 1+ year stay at my current company.
I often just do it for doing it, then I hit it with I need to know why this needs to be done and done correctly. Then things take shape, curiosity out performs every other emotion.
I can agree to only one points here especially the standard library swallowing exceptions part. That sometimes is little on the border of Go's philosophy vs the actual issue. Just read the f-ing manual would be the argument, but it kind of becomes too verbose and critical if mishandled.
A great post, diving into a specific tool for a lot of things.
I think the media metadata is messed up, the software is not consistently adhering to the standards. Look at the blog post and the Apple photos have a lot more metadata then Google or any other photo taking software.
I have to say the different of fields are in orders of magnitude more than the rest. How much additional info they cram into a single photo is bewildering.
I really liked the post, it had dumping of data into sqlite database and writing queries to get certain things, how cute and interesting that idea is. My brain is running in all directions at this now.
LLMs to write queries to get photos from albums with natural language and metadata without actually processing the image, is one I can hit straight off my head.
I confirmed that it Apple who is pouring love into those photos. It probably has to do a lot of things in the background to get the metadata. Such a irony of tech today. Lagging behind the trend but way ahead of everyone in the core.
How AI writing supercharged an addictive pattern
We'll have been there and done that. The initial WOW! to the glorious vibe crap that comes after 12 hours of prumpting.
I know there is a lot of value in AI, I am not a AI doomer, but the things people are assuming like 10x dev, replacing a junior dev, an intern, I don't buy that both emotionally and mentally. It just hurts the morale of humans to say that. If that is the case, then just flip the lever and let the software world be in chaos.
AI assisted coding can be a bit addictive I agree, that's why if there is some joy in my side project, I do start it myself and then ask AI bits and pieces to figure it out, I don't let it rip my project, I am still an advocate of chat based AI-assisted development. That friction of copy-pasta I can tolerate but not the shit-shoving of vibe coded mess.
5 Docker networking concepts that everyone should know
This was a fantastic walk-through of one of the un-explained parts of docker. Surely there are exhaustive lists of commands to perform things in the docker networking, but very few dive into the why part. This article specifically did that and all the commands made sense.
The bridge is the safe default, setting custom host is for advanced usage, avoid if possible, only dive if necessary.
Custom networks makes communication clear between containers
user names, not IPs.
If python looks odd, how about SQL? That is left to right but evaluated mostly from the right to left right? mostly I asking loosely here, though aggregates might be exceptions and other things I am not aware of.
Programs should be valid as they are typed.
Good points, yes python’s list comprehension is an outlier at it as it needs the last bit first to understand the whole context.
No AI is not making Engineers 10x productive
See the copium? Too much bearish on AI now. Suddenly people realise they need to put breaks to the hype and focus on improving the craft before cracks start forming into dents and large holes.
Making all your engineers feel constantly anxious about their performance is bad for your company. It will make your engineers not want to work for you. This is a recipe for short term thinking that will encourage engineers to max out bad metrics, like lines of code. Code review will get neglected, tech debt will compound, and in the long term the whole company will be footing the bill of those errors
What a relief, to hear or sorry read it. Every word of this article is healing me. I will write a separate thought on this article.
LLMs makes us dumber in the longer run
The comfort we get when offloading our cognitive load to LLMs is bad for us. Cognitive load should exist, and if we reduce it too much – if we stop thinking – we can actually unlearn how to think.
Well said. Consistent reliance on AI is and will distinguish some human from an honest caring human.
What's the point of vibe coding if I still have to pay a dev to fix it
People are coping seriously on AI now. Not that AI is bad, it's not yet there to build software blindly and let laymen control the steering. Devin, you tried, unfortunately, we won't be moving forward with your application.
Why building my blog is more fun than filling it
Its a rabbit hole. I have done it and seen people do it too. Waylon Walker's Markata (its a python plugin based ssg, so easy to extend and setup) and my static site generator (I am calling it burrow, inspired as a home for golang gophers). I used jekyll > markata and felt the calling for writing my own ssg and here I am.
It feels rewarding to show the world what you have built for yourself and brag about it when someone sees it. It's like a garden, what is writing equivalent in gardening? Planting trees, that's how the blog gets populated, and adding different things to the garden is what is addictive and feels like a gardener.
Collaborative blogging, I think hashnode tried to do it with community blogs and co-authoring. I like it but I feel that it's quite rare to collaborate on shared interesting topics, a podcast or a video interview might be a better fit to show the communication. Blogs don't really fit that quite well in my opinion, but yes distinct parts of the blog could be collaborated.
I mean why not? looping one billion times in javascript makes your computer warm, fine. I would rather install and run Android studio than touch javascript. These days, running a local model around 3-5 Billion parameters (on 8GB ram) could easily burn your computer not just warm it.
Interesting bits
Prompt
What is the time?
Watched
Geez, that is a lot of money. Models are really a way to fool and cash out money from people, these AI labs have just turned LLMs to be money making machines.
Didn’t watch anything apart from this in tech, read a lot of things this week, so off out of social media for a while.
Learnt
SQL Week 5
Learning the different output modes of output mode of a query like excel, opening the result in a editor.
Using generate_series to generate interesting data points
Understanding the whole function parameters and ways to use generate series which is a virtual table / function.
Tech News
Notion Releases Offline page support
xAI secretly drops Sonic Models directly into Agentic IDEs as their Coding Models
Google almost halts the maintenance of Pytype: Another project in the Google's Graveyard.
Happy Coding :)
For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#759th edition) , and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.