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Articles by Antony Nyagah
I Used a Honeypot Instead of a CAPTCHA on Our Quote Form
At work, I'm rebuilding a website for an organization that serves medical laboratories. The most important page on the new site is a form where a lab picks the services it needs and asks for a quote. Every public form attracts spam bots. The usual fix is a CAPTCHA, and I didn't want one. Why not a CAPTCHA A CAPTCHA makes every real visitor prove they are human so you can stop a few bots. Image puzzles are hard for people using screen readers and annoying for everyone else.
I Tried to Learn RAG and Got Stuck on API Costs. Turns Out My CPU Could Do the Expensive Bit.
A few months ago, I started building a Retrieval-Augmented Generation application because I wanted to understand what was actually happening underneath all the buzzwords. The project I built was appropriately named simple_rag. The idea was simple enough: upload a PDF, ask questions about it, and have an LLM answer using information from the document. I got it working. Then I mostly abandoned it. The thing I couldn't figure out how to handle cleanly was running the embedding model locally.
You Don't Need Docker Desktop on Linux
Docker Desktop was using 4GB of RAM on my machine. Sitting there. Doing nothing. No containers running. Just the daemon. I don't know about you, but 4 gigs for a container runtime that isn't running any containers is a hard no from me. I'm on Fedora, but this applies to Ubuntu, Debian, whatever. If you're running Linux, you don't need Docker Desktop. So I started looking at what I actually needed. Turns out: not much.
How I Built a Real-Time DDoS Detection Engine That Learns What Normal Looks Like
Imagine your web server suddenly starts getting hammered by thousands of requests from one IP address. Without any protection, your server slows down, legitimate users get blocked out, and you have no idea it's even happening until it's too late. That's the problem I set out to solve by building a real-time anomaly detection engine alongside a Nextcloud server.
Everyone Struggles
Everyone struggles. You’re not behind. You’re learning. Over the past three weeks, I’ve been the primary contributor to a Fedora project, and honestly, the experience has been as challenging as it has been rewarding. The project began as a fresh Python code base, with contributors from various backgrounds jumping in to help. There was no consistent coding style, no defined structure, and no clear direction, just a group of people doing their best to contribute, myself included.
The Unexpected Challenges of Becoming the Sole Developer on a Project
The trials and tribulations seemed never ending Introduction Have you ever found yourself suddenly becoming the sole developer on a project? I have, and it was a journey filled with unexpected challenges and valuable lessons. I got hired to a company in the healthcare industry a few years ago, alongside another developer who interviewed with me on the same day. Over time, I focused more on the back end, while my colleague handled the frontend and bits of the backend.
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