Barend Erasmus

This is where I share thoughts, ideas, and things I'm working on — sometimes technical, sometimes personal. Just me, writing about what matters to me.

Featured

• LLMs: Not Magic, Just Math (and Marketing)

  Published: 16 Jul, 2025 |  at  10:26 PM

  Take large language models (LLMs). Fundamentally, they’re just probabilistic models trained on huge datasets.

• Contain the Mess: How I Use Design Patterns to Evolve Legacy Systems

  Published: 13 Jul, 2025 |  at  12:28 PM

  One of the most consistent contributors to success in the projects I’ve led has been the strategic use of design patterns.

• What My URL Shortener Taught Me About Malicious Traffic

  Published: 7 Jul, 2025 |  at  08:03 AM

  I’ve been hosting a small URL shortener for just over a year now. It’s one of those deceptively simple projects — a few routes, a small database, not much to it.

Recent Posts

• Real Estate vs. The Stock Market: What 7 Years Taught Me

  Published: 1 Aug, 2025 |  at  01:17 PM

  In 2016, I bought my first property. Like many people, I believed real estate was the safest way to build wealth. After all, “property always goes up,” right?

• Automating DNS Setup for DigitalOcean Droplets with Bash and Cloudflare

  Published: 21 Jul, 2025 |  at  02:03 PM

  For the past few years, I’ve used DigitalOcean for hosting small projects, experiments, and services.

• How I Converted My South African Driver's License in Germany (No Test Needed)

  Published: 5 Jul, 2025 |  at  03:37 PM

  One of the great advantages of moving to Germany as a South African is that you can convert your South African driver’s license without needing to take a theoretical or practical test.

• The Latency Trap I Fell Into While Benchmarking Postgres

  Published: 30 Jun, 2025 |  at  11:17 AM

  Lately, I’ve been tinkering with a Postgres setup, mostly to see how much performance I could squeeze out of it. Nothing formal — just a curiosity-driven experiment to understand what’s possible with the right tuning.

• When a Custom In-Memory Engine Outran DuckDB and MS SQL

  Published: 23 Jun, 2025 |  at  03:24 PM

  A while back at a previous job, I spent some time working on a performance-critical query. The dataset wasn’t huge — somewhere between 10 and 50 million rows.

• I Built a Chrome Extension

  Published: 21 Jun, 2025 |  at  12:11 PM

  I recently published my first Chrome Extension. Not because I had a big idea I wanted to take to market — but because I wanted to explore something unfamiliar.

• Why Just Writing Code Isn’t Enough Anymore

  Published: 18 Jun, 2025 |  at  06:55 PM

  A few years ago, getting into software engineering felt more straightforward. Learn how to code, pick up a framework or two.

• What I Learned from Writing the Same Code in 4 Languages

  Published: 16 Jun, 2025 |  at  10:48 AM

  I recently wrote a small utility to parse South African Identity Numbers — extracting the date of birth, gender, citizenship status, and validating the checksum.