How to use streaming replication with PostgreSQL

12 Apr 2019 By Peter Bex 7 min. read

In this post, I want to explain how to set up streaming replication for PostgreSQL. We want to be able to do (read-only) reporting on live data, but reduce load on the main database server. Some background: We offer Metabase to many of our customers for data analysis and reporting. This means we don’t have to hand-code everything into our application. It even allows savvy customers to write their own reports.

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Subtleties of time zone calculations in Postgres

19 Dec 2018 By Peter Bex 10 min. read

As any programmer well knows, time zones can be a real pain. They seem almost invented just to make programmers’ lives more difficult! Luckily, if your tools are good, a lot of pain can be spared. At Code Yellow, we work a lot with PostgreSQL. This really has time zones handled. Imagine my surprise when a customer opened a ticket that they got unexpected dates in their CSV files.

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APIs only a mother could love

24 Jan 2018 By Peter Bex 10 min. read

Lately we’ve been integrating more 3rd party APIs than usual, and the experience was less than great in almost every case. Let’s take a look at how ugly some APIs will get. In the descriptions below, company names have been redacted to protect the (not so) innocent. XML is not hip, we must offer JSON One of our 3rd party vendors has a geocoding API that is based on XML.

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QR encoding

28 Dec 2017 By Daan van der Kallen 4 min. read

Intro For a project we had to put text in QR-codes, seemed simple enough, but sadly the printers that our customers used only supported the alphanumeric-type QR-code which has a small available character set of 45 characters (0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ $%*+-./:). But we wanted to be able to send unicode strings which require a much larger character set. So it quickly became apparent that we needed some kind of encoding. The most well-known encoding is probably Base64 however sadly this uses too many characters for our goal.

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