Vlad Călin

CTO @ Vuuh.com | GameDev @ csvgames.com

🇬🇧🇺🇸 SpamLabs: Some more validation done (or not?)

After recently pivoted the direction of SpamLabs from being an email address analyzer API to a spam filter targeting cold emails, I decided to continue validating this new approach. The problem is real, I am dealing with it myself: on my work email I am getting some annoying cold emails,

🇬🇧🇺🇸 Getting more out of ChatGPT when developing SpamLabs

Recently I began exploring the idea of integrating ChatGPT into SpamLabs in order to build it into an unsolicited message blocker. To do that, the initial idea was to ask ChatGPT in a prompt something in the lines of is the following message a cold email? respond "yes"

🇬🇧🇺🇸 SpamLabs: Back to the drawing board

The initial outreach to gather feedback about an API that validates email addresses based on various analysis (DNS analysis being the main one) didn't turn out the way I hoped. Sent about 40 cold emails about gathering feedback to gauge the interest in such a service. Although the

🇬🇧🇺🇸 SpamLabs: We are live!

We launched and we're ready to go! Although there are a million things I would still want to do, I bit the bullet and made launched the MVP of SpamLabs: an API that tells whether a user is spammy or not based on the email address and generated

🇬🇧🇺🇸 SpamLabs: Tech stack does matter

For the indie hackers out there that say that tech stack doesn't matter, I say: it actually matters. But not in the way you'd think. It doesn't matter for the success of the company because some stacks are flashier or more optimized for performance.

🇬🇧🇺🇸 Your code is as good as your data is structured

The conversation about code quality usually revolves around code smells, patterns, modules, languages, principles and other things like that. Things that, indeed, affect to some degree the quality of the code, and it is much easier to talk about them in isolation to put up a fast example. But I

🇬🇧🇺🇸 I moved my blog to Ghost

I had multiple attempts to settle on a blog engine to write things on from time to time. I tried Wordpress, some static site generators, even built my own blog engine called DevXBlog. Now I moved everything to Ghost, and I hope it will be the last change I make

🇬🇧🇺🇸 Creative industries are under assault by AI

The hype with the recent AI developments is still going somewhat strong. Even though the initial awe went away and people started to see ChatGPT for what it is, a text generation tool that sometimes gives good answers but most of the time it gives the wrong ones, confidently, the

🇬🇧🇺🇸 Is a fancy UI that important?

This post will be about a topic that tends to be pretty divisive: is UI (user interface, aka the design of an app) important? Or how important it is? How much effort needs to be put into it? In the startup world, where resources are scarce and you have to

🇬🇧🇺🇸 Is AI a game changer right now?

Given the current fuss about OpenAI's newest release, the ChatGPT3 model, I wanted to share my thoughts about it. I played with it for a little bit, followed what people used it for or say it can be used for, and tried to find some more practical uses

🇬🇧🇺🇸 Why do we overengineer?

The most common sin a software developer tends to do is overengineering. I have been guilty of doing this more often than I'd like to admit, and I am still prone to doing it from time to time. Why do we, as software engineers, tend to overengineer? The

🇬🇧🇺🇸 My favorite things in crypto(graphy)

Remember when crypto used to stand for cryptography and not cryptocurrencies? I do! I was scrolling around and thought: you don't read a lot of cryptography stuff anymore, or security protocols. Or maybe I am in the wrong social media bubbles, and I don't get that

🇬🇧🇺🇸 The worst thing you can do as a tech company

For a while now, I wanted to write a few words about this topic: what is the absolute worst decision you can make as a decision maker involving a tech product (internal or external)? I guess we all have our own definitions for what that "absolute worst decision"

🇬🇧🇺🇸 I built a blog engine, now what?

Long time no write! 4 months more precisely. I can't believe 4 months have passed since I last posted a new blog post. But I have my reasons, and they are good, trust me. I was busy building a blog engine from scratch, and migrate my blog to

🇬🇧🇺🇸 The challenges of building a blogging platform

When I am not working on Vuuh I am building on the side a blogging platform/engine named DevXBlog, which is powering the blog you are currently reading. I did that because I wanted to have a more long-term web-accessible solution for writing my thoughts. In my old blog version,

🇬🇧🇺🇸 What I've been up to lately

Long time no write! It's been like two or three months since the last time I posted something on this blog, and I'm going to tell you why. I have been pushing real hard with my current job (being the CTO of an early tech company

🇬🇧🇺🇸 Push yourself further with no zero days

Everybody is on constant look for methods to boost their productivity, to achieve more, be it for the money,for the status, to prove somebody wrong or simply for the fun of it. Some know it as the hustler mindset, somerefer to it as being an high-achiever, in some circles

🇬🇧🇺🇸 What's the fuss with Kubernetes?

It's no secret that nowadays, Kubernetes is dominating the devops landscape, and slowly is becoming the de-facto standard for managing containerized apps at scale. I am going to write a little about this, giving some pointers to people who are not (yet) experts in Kubernetes to get them

🇬🇧🇺🇸 Frequent code smells and how to fix them

A code smell is a programming pattern that affect the long-term maintenance of some project. It is a bad design decision took at some point in time, that affect the way other people will interact with the code later on. Code smells aren't necessary a single decision. It&

🇬🇧🇺🇸 Decision framework

Decisions, decisions... am I right? Each day we need to make a lot of small decisions: what to wear, what to eat, what to buy, what route to take to wherever we want to go, etc. For most people, taking decisions can be crippling, as they get bombarded by doubt

🇬🇧🇺🇸 What you should care about, as a developer

In the tech industry, people have different opinions about this subject, that's a truth. But that won't stop me from laying out some of the things I believe a developer should care about and focus on, in order to be considered a successful developer. This differs

🇬🇧🇺🇸 Real estate aggregator - Another scraped idea

A month ago, I had a new idea for a new project I wanted to try. I got fed up with the low quality of the real estate listings on the most popular sites, so I decided to make a curated feed for myself, to be able to extract the

🇬🇧🇺🇸 Programming paradigms

As software developers, we all write code day in and day out. Import some libraries, instantiate some classes, write some functions, write some unit tests, etc. At the surface level, it all seems the same. All our code is composed of the same building blocks we all know and love:

🇬🇧🇺🇸 Django's delete() is harmful

Update 21st December 2021 (9 days after the original post) After digging into the Django code for the Collector and the delete() method, I found out that this behavior, even though it's not ideal and has poor performance when working with a lot of data, I discovered that

🇬🇧🇺🇸 On work-life balance

More and more, you hear about companies offering "good life-work balance" as a job perk, which is weird. Work-life balance has nothing to do with a job description. You can't give work-life balance to somebody. As a company, you can only put the needs of the