#performance
Optimization, benchmarks, speed
Writing
- How Prompt Caching Works
What LLM APIs cache, what breaks the cache, and why long agent loops get 5–10× cheaper with it.
- Django ORM: From sync_to_async Threads to Native psycopg3
A deep dive into how Django's ORM became truly async — how the old thread-pool approach worked, what changed in Django 6.0 with psycopg3 and ContextVar, and why asyncpg was left out.
- How I Optimized My Zsh Startup Time
An audit of my zsh config turned up shell forks, redundant plugins, and eager evals. Here are the eight fixes that shaved an estimated 400-700 ms off cold start.
- Redis’s License Change and the Valkey Fork
The story of Redis's controversial license change in March 2024 and how the open-source community responded by creating Valkey—a fork that's now outperforming the original on speed and efficiency.
- Django Native PostgreSQL Connection Pooling
Configure Django’s native PostgreSQL connection pool with psycopg, handle connection cleanup, and measure performance before and after.
TIL notes
- Jul 24, 2026
Embedding pipelines do not feed whole documents straight into the model. They first use the embedding model’s tokenizer to measure and split text into token-bounded, overlapping chunks, then embed each chunk and store the vectors. Tokenizer must match the model. Tools like marcelroed/gigatoken accelerate this preparation at corpus scale but do not create embeddings themselves.
- Jun 8, 2026
[karpathy/autoresearch] is a concept/framework that allows one to leverage LLM to run an optimization loops based on a criteria. davebcn87/pi-autoresearch takes this further has built a generic optimization long run loop method on top of pi agent. gemini
- Feb 10, 2026
Hono based on web standards is a great option for js runtimes esp. if you plan to deploy your code to cloudflare workers, bun or deno. You get faster startup time and cross-platform compatibility.
- Dec 27, 2025
how uv got so fast. UV performance is because of design decisions while rust contributes to micro optimizations.