sreeraj.dev

Dispatches on DevOps, Postgres, programming & treks

Sreeraj Rajan · Backend engineer · Medley Learning

Deploy Index Ascend! sreeraj.dev — DevOps, Postgres, programming and Himalayan treks

Dispatches from a backend engineer: Kubernetes pipelines, Postgres benchmarks, Django internals and the occasional Himalayan pass.

20 dispatches 4 sections Since 2021 Last printed

Deploy · Index · AscendDispatches on DevOps, Postgres, programming & Himalayan treksAll power to the pipelines20 dispatches printed since 2021Red, black & cream — nothing elseRead it. Ship it. Climb it.

Fresh off the press

The three newest dispatches after the lead — each one a poster of its own.

Four sections

Choose your front

08 DevOps Kubernetes, pipelines, proxies — the machinery underneath. 02 Postgres Indexes, identifiers and benchmarks from inside the database. 01 Programming Workflows, tooling and code — how the work gets done. 03 Treks Himalayan passes and summits, and what went wrong.

The complete index

All 20 dispatches, newest first, stepping down the diagonal four at a time.

  1. 2026

    My Distributed Dev Workflow

    How I run my dev workflows across a Macbook Pro, a Hetzner instance and my phone, stitched together with tmux, Tailscale and Claude Code.
    Programming 2 min
  2. 2024

    Converting a multipage pdf to tiff

    Converting a multipage pdf to tiff
    python 2 min
  3. 2023

    Kuari Pass Trek

    After doing the Deorital-Tungnath hike, it was time to get back to the trails. One of my friends at the time wanted to do one as well, so we decided to do Kuari Pass. Kuari Pass is suited for first time hikers, only having three days of hiking and 2 nights of camping in the woods. It's also a rewarding trek in terms of visuals, passing through beautiful forests, with beautiful snow capped peaks in the background. We did it in the first week of March, so we got to experience some snow at higher a
    Treks 3 min

  4. Flashing an ESP8266-01

    Flashing a ESP8266? Follow this guide written by a beginner for beginners.
    arduino 2 min

  5. Benchmarking UUID v4 vs ULID

    Benchmarking UUID against ULID.
    Postgres 1 min
  6. 2022

    UUID vs Serials

    Benchmarking UUID and Serial Values in Postgres and Python.
    Postgres 2 min

  7. Adding Basic Authentication via NGINX in Kubernetes

    Basic Auth via NGINX in kubernetes
    DevOps 1 min

  8. Django Kafka Integration

    Django Kafka Integration using Faust.
    django 2 min

  9. Routing stuff using traefik/nginx

    Using traefik/nginx as a Reverse Proxy.
    DevOps 5 min

  10. Setting up OpenTelemetry in Django gUnicorn ASGI

    Setup OpenTelemetry for Django running on gUnicorn ASGI.
    DevOps 3 min

  11. Using sidecar containers in k8s

    Pods are the basic unit of deployment in k8s and in a typical k8s setup, your application container is probably running inside a pod. Pods themselves are containers, and you can run multiple containers sharing the same volume and network interfaces of the pod concurrently. This is called the sidecar pattern. We run an emr django application connected to a RDS postgres database using RDS IAM auth. To make this work, we run a cronjob which generates a token every 10 minutes which is used by the a
    DevOps 3 min

  12. Setting up AWS Amplify for a Next JS SSR app with Terraform

    Setting up Amplify for nextjs SSR via Terraform
    DevOps 4 min

  13. Kedarkantha Trek

    Summary of kedarkantha trek
    Treks 3 min

  14. Reducing our Deployment times by 87%

    Leveraging github actions by using state to determine whether to build a dockerimage or not.
    DevOps 2 min
  15. 2021

    Moving from AWS Loadbalancers to Nginx

    We run a k8s cluster for our healthcare EMR application. At the time, we only had one public facing service, so we used a Kubernetes Service of Type LoadBalancer. resource "kubernetes_service" "django" { metadata { name = "django" namespace = kubernetes_namespace.app_namespace.metadata[0].name annotations = tomap( { "service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-ssl-cert" = var.django_acm_arn, "service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-ssl-por
    DevOps 2 min

  16. Chopta Chandrashila Trek

    Pro Tips 1. Add/plan for buffer days for bad weather. Summit hikes usually go to the highest altitude possible, and the weather at those places can change within minutes. 2. Prebook your hotels/hostels. Internet connectivity is spotty. Use hotel aggregator apps to look for hotels and call them up. Sometimes you might get a cheaper rate. Ask if geyser and other facilities are available before booking. 3. Figure out multiple ways to get to your base village of the hike. If you miss your bus, k
    Treks 6 min

  17. Django Bulk Save - 2 Fast 2 Big

    Continuing from Django Bulk Save, I wanted to test how would the copy_from function perform when I scale to over a million records. The copy_from scales incredibly well, it took 4 seconds to write 1.6 million rows. The rest of the article strays away from the actual topic. I decided to play around with different CSV libraries and figure out what would be the most efficient library to use when you have a file this large. You'd probably never encounter a scenario where you'd have to parse a mil
    tech 2 min

  18. Streaming through millions of records trying to match an encrypted field : Java

    A year ago I was working on a really tiny part of a large non-consumer facing product (idk what's the correct term). I can't divulge much, I have done a lot of illegal things like calling a politician an idiot on social media, so I don't want to add more to the list. Imagine you ran an ice cream subscription service, and you had a lot of people on the payroll tasked with managing renewals for subscribers. Let's call them agents. You had an online portal for customers to manage/renew their subsc
    tech 3 min

  19. Connecting Django to RDS via pgbouncer using IAM auth

    Setting up the infra We primarily use a django backend with RDS postgres in a kubernetes cluster for production environments. We were trying to setup an environment which would be HIPAA compliant and secure as well, as well as keep complexity to a minimum in the backend layer.  We decided to go with IAM authentication to connect to RDS for the django application. The tricky part was to figure out how we would add pgbouncer between RDS and django to manage connection pooling issues. We setup a
    DevOps 3 min

  20. Django Bulk Save

    Using bulk_create? You could switch to copy_from if your usecase fits.
    django 2 min