All articles by Brian Luft

Thumbnail image for Embeddings: A Bridge From LLMs to Your Data

Embeddings: A Bridge From LLMs to Your Data

With the ubiquity of media coverage around “AI everything” and companies racing to add shiny new “AI-driven” features, having a working understanding of the fundamental technologies driving the hype will help you find ways to leverage the good parts and …
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Using Crossing with React-Router

With the version 1.0 release of react-router, the named Route feature was dropped. In earlier versions, you were able to define each Route with a name parameter: <Route path="/account/billing" name="account-billing" /> and link to the RouteHandler via: <Link to="account-billing">Billing</Link> This …
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Four Libs Good, Two Libs Better

[with apologies to Mr. Orwell] I’ve noticed a subtle shift in how we approach building up new sites over the last couple of years. Our approach to site construction used to favor collecting open source apps and gluing them together …
Thumbnail image for Why Regular Demos are Part of Our Development Process

Why Regular Demos are Part of Our Development Process

Our team functions in different capacities for each business engagement, but we typically have a project or few where we’re exclusively building a large site for a client. In those scenarios we tend to use a loosely defined two-week development …
Thumbnail image for On Fixtures and Factories

On Fixtures and Factories

We’ve made it a general rule to move away from relying on fixtures in our projects. The main reasons are: Fixtures are fragile. They often break when the schema changes or even worse they appear to work but introduce subtle …
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Disabling South Migrations

It is often handy to disable (either temporarily or permanently) South migrations for an app. “Disable” in this context means preventing an app’s migrations from being executed so that the app is managed via syncdb while in this state. A …
Thumbnail image for Resetting Your South Migrations

Resetting Your South Migrations

Why? A common question from South users is how to reset the migrations back to an initial state. The reasons for doing this are often related to the number of migrations growing steadily over the life of the project. You’ve …