Another Dev's Two Cents

Sign in Subscribe

Nish Tahir

Principal Software Engineer. I write about engineering and fun projects I work on.

📍 🌎 https://social.nishtahir.com/@nish

Statistics for Programmers - Frequency Distributions

A Frequency Distribution is a common way to understand a trend in a dataset. It's a tabular representation of the number of times a value appears in a dataset. If we denote values in a dataset as \(x_1, x_2, \ldots, x_n\), their corresponding frequencies can

Statistics for Programmers - Introduction

Many programmers often express an interest in improving their math skills. When probed on why they haven't acted on it, a common trend I found was due to how difficult it can be to build intuition around mathematical concepts. In my journey of self-improvement and growth, I discovered

Reverse Engineering an RDP and WebLogic Attack

I've been learning more about common attacks that appear in my Nginx logs to learn more about what happens beyond the log entries. The internet appeared to enjoy my previous post on the subject so I thought I'd share more of my findings. If you haven&

I made a Mastodon bot with GoToSocial

I've been running my own GoToSocial ActivityPub server for a while and it's been great. It's Mastodon compatible, super easy to set up and works well as a single-account server despite being in alpha. 👋 Thanks for reading. If you like my work, leave a

Is GitHub Copilot For Everyone?

I've been using GitHub Copilot (Copilot) for almost a year. As discussed in a previous write-up, I consider it a modern iteration of IntelliSense or autocomplete. If you're not yet acquainted with it, Copilot serves as an IDE integration that leverages the context surrounding your code

I looked through attacks in my access logs. Here's what I found

I've been self-hosting for over a decade. It's freeing because I own my data, and do not depend on any platform other than my cloud host, which I can easily switch off. Self-hosting gives much insight into what it takes to run a cloud service. Anyone

Exploring properties of function composition in Kotlin

Function composition is a technique where you create a new function by applying the result of one function to another. I've sometimes heard this described as "chaining" multiple functions together. Assuming two functions \(f(x)\) and \(g(x)\), we can compose a new function \(h(x)

Being busy is not the same as being productive

Being busy means having a lot to do. This stands in contrast to being productive, which measures effectiveness towards a purpose. Productivity efficiently utilizes time to accomplish set priorities. It requires clarity of purpose and the ability to discern the relative importance of work that needs to be done. It&

Information sourcing - An underrated skill everyone should know

Ok, so what did I learn? With the ever-increasing pace at which content is created, SEO and search engines trying to make search more intuitive[4], it's becoming increasingly more and more difficult to separate high-quality information from the chaff.

On OpenAI, GPT, and products

This week OpenAI had a fantastic keynote at their Dev Day event. They announced new products and enhancements to ChatGPT[1]. Interestingly, some parts of the internet described the keynote as an "Extinction Event"[2] for many AI startups. Many of the startups reportedly facing extinction share the