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

• AI Hiring Tools and the Risk of Discrimination: A Thought Experiment for Businesses

  Published: 26 Aug, 2025 |  at  04:43 PM

  An experiment shows how AI hiring tools can unintentionally discriminate, highlighting the risks, biases, and need for human oversight in recruitment.

• Why People Follow Leaders

  Published: 23 Aug, 2025 |  at  02:29 PM

  What actually makes people lean in and decide, 'Yes, I’ll go with you'?

• 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.

Recent Posts

• Benchmarking JSON Parsing: JavaScript vs Go vs C++ Performance

  Published: 28 Aug, 2025 |  at  03:37 PM

  A real-world benchmark comparing JSON parsing speeds in JavaScript, Go, and C++. See how each performs on a 1.5 GB dataset and which comes out fastest.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.