Clivern

Personal site of Ahmed (Clivern): software engineer and occasional writer. Tutorials and notes on backend systems, cloud native infrastructure, observability, and AI agents.

This file is a curated map for AI agents. Prefer the markdown sources on GitHub over HTML when you need the full text of a post or project page. For questions about Ahmed’s background, jobs, or skills, read the resume first. Site: https://clivern.com — Contact: hello@clivern.com

Projects

Gauntlet: Guides, Articles, Podcasts, Videos and Notes to Build Reliable Large-Scale Distributed Systems. (markdown)
Cattle: A Platform to Run and Share Code. It Supports PHP, Python, Ruby, Elixir, Java, Go, Rust, C and C++ (markdown)
Cygnus-X1: The immensity of the observable universe is difficult to grasp (markdown)
Goenv: Manage Your Applications Go Environment (markdown)
Rhino: HTTP Mocking & Debugging Service. (markdown)
OpsWork: OpsWork Swiss Knife! (markdown)
Beaver: A Real Time Messaging System. (markdown)
Beetle: A Kubernetes multi-cluster deployment automation service. (markdown)
Chaos: A Server Chaos Maker, Set up in Minutes. (markdown)
Helium: A Fast, Secure and Reliable Newsletter System, Set up in Minutes. (markdown)
Peanut: Deploy Databases and Services Easily for Development and Testing Pipelines. (markdown)
Poodle: A fast and beautiful command line tool to build API requests. (markdown)
Walrus: A Fast, Secure and Reliable System Backup, Set up in Minutes. (markdown)
Tyran: A Vector Search as a Service, Set up in Minutes. (markdown)
Lynx: A Fast, Secure and Reliable Terraform Backend, Set up in Minutes. (markdown)
Gulper: A Command Line Tool to Backup and Restore SQLite, MySQL and PostgreSQL. (markdown)
Meez: AI Assistant and Copilot SDK for SaaS Applications. (markdown)
Oak: Elixir Prometheus Exporter (markdown)

Posts

Building AI Coding Agent from Scratch: I wanted to understand how a coding agent actually works so i built a small one in Python without frameworks. Each piece is small enough … (markdown)
Understanding Embeddings: An embedding is just a way to turn text into a list of numbers. Same idea as coordinates on a map. sentences that mean similar things end… (markdown)
Understanding Elixir Supervisor: A Supervisor is a process that supervises other processes (child processes). Supervisors are used to build a hierarchical process structu… (markdown)
Understanding Elixir GenServer: A GenServer is a process like any other Elixir process and it can be used to store state, execute code asynchronously and so on. Think of… (markdown)
Collecting Phoenix’s Metrics with Prometheus: This tutorial walks you through integrating Oak with your Phoenix application step by step. Oak is a high-performance metrics collection … (markdown)
Understanding Tool Calling with LLMs: Tool calling (also known as function calling) is a powerful feature in modern Large Language Models that enables them to interact with ex… (markdown)
Building a Secure MCP Server for Weather: Learn how to build a secure Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for weather data with authentication, geocoding, and production-ready dep… (markdown)
Intention Based Routing in Langgraph: Intention-based routing in langgraph involves using conditional logic to direct the flow within the graph based on user intention. (markdown)
Langgraph In Action: LangGraph library enables agent orchestration — offering customizable architectures, long-term memory, and human-in-the-loop to reliably … (markdown)
Memory Safety in Rust: Learn how Rust achieves memory safety without runtime overhead, preventing crashes, data corruption, and security vulnerabilities through… (markdown)
Building a Neovim Plugin: Creating Neovim plugins with Lua can significantly enhance your development workflow. This guide will walk you through building a simple … (markdown)
Building a Human in the Loop Active Learning Loop: Active learning picks the examples that teach a model the most. Put a human in that loop and you spend labels where they count, not on ea… (markdown)
Running Llama-3.1-8B Locally With vLLM: In this guide, I’ll show you how to run Llama-3.1 8B locally on a Mac using vLLM. This is just for testing, not for a production setup. (markdown)
Tools Calling with Langchain: When constructing a langchain agent, you can provide tools to allow the agent to access up-to-date information and tailor its answers bas… (markdown)
Learning Lua for Neovim Part 1: Lua’s syntax is relatively straightforward that why it has become the preferred language for Neovim configuration and plugin development…. (markdown)
Load testing with k6: A while ago, I came across this a nice load testing tool called k6. It’s an open-source project developed by Grafana Labs that lets devel… (markdown)
Understanding Distributed Tracing: Distributed Tracing is a technique to keep track of requests as they flow from the frontend layers through a complex distributed backend … (markdown)
Text Chunking Techniques With Langchain Part 1: In this article we explain different ways to split a long document into smaller chunks that can fit into your model’s context window. Lan… (markdown)
Building My Own RAG With OpenAI, Qdrant and LangChain: RAG stands for Retrieval Augmented Generation. It enhances the large language models (LLMs) by integrating them with external data source… (markdown)
Understanding Prometheus Metric Types: Here is the four metrics supported by Prometheus, along with their use cases and functions that can be used to query these metric types. (markdown)
Securing Prometheus Metrics in Echo Golang Framework: Echo golang framework supports Prometheus Metrics middleware, but the middleware itself doesn’t support authentication. We can use the ba… (markdown)
Early Returns in Elixir: Early returns is often employed to exit a function as soon as an exceptional or negative condition is met. It won’t take much time when l… (markdown)
Finally Moved Clivern from WordPress to Jekyll: Today I just finished migrating my personal website from WordPress to Jekyll after running it for over 10 years (since 2010). It was a lo… (markdown)
Learning Python Data Structures: Python ships with an extensive set of data structures in its standard library. I will cover most of them in this guide. (markdown)
Supervised Learning With scikit-learn: Supervised learning with scikit-learn is a popular approach for building predictive models based on labeled data. It involves splitting t… (markdown)

Optional

Older posts. Skip these unless you need historical context.

Getting Started With Ruby: Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite language… (markdown)
Strangler Fig Pattern Explained: Strangler Figs is a nightmare that lives on other tropical trees, stealing their soil nutrients, water, and even sunl… (markdown)
How to Connect Arduino With a Raspberry PI over a Serial Port: In this post, You will understand how to collect values from an Arduino with a connected Raspberry PI over a serial p… (markdown)
How to Setup a HA Cassandra Cluster: Apache Cassandra is a NoSQL database with flexible deployment options that’s highly performant (especially for writes… (markdown)
Apache Cassandra for Developers Part 2: In Cassandra for Developers Part 1, I explained how to run cassandra cluster with docker, replication and consistency… (markdown)
Working with Nginx Ingress Controller: A Kubernetes Ingress is a robust way to expose your services outside the cluster. It lets you consolidate your routin… (markdown)
Separate Test Cases in Golang With Build Tags: A build tag or a build constraint as described in the build package documentation, is a line comment that begins // +… (markdown)
Kubernetes Services in a Nutshell: Service is a resource you create to make a single, constant point of entry to a group of pods providing the same serv… (markdown)
Apache Cassandra for Developers Part 1: Apache Cassandra is a free and open-source, distributed, NoSQL database management system designed to handle large am… (markdown)
Adding a Unique Request ID to Each Request in Django: You can do that in Django using a middleware. The middleware needs to generate a unique request id (e.g. using UUID) … (markdown)
Kubernetes Deployment in a Nutshell: Deployment is a higher-level resource meant for deploying applications and updating them declaratively, instead of do… (markdown)
Concurrency in Elixir: Concurrency is a fundamental concept in Elixir, a functional programming language built on the Erlang virtual machine… (markdown)
Installing Nginx, MySQL, PHP on Ubuntu 22.04: In this guide you will learn how to install Nginx, MySQL 8.0 and PHP 8.1 and PHP-FPM on Ubuntu 22.04. (markdown)
A Deep Dive into Metrics Based Alerting With Elasticsearch: Elasticsearch is an open-source, distributed search and analytics engine based on the Lucene search engine library. I… (markdown)
Leader Election with Consul and Golang: Leader election is the process of designating a single node as the organizer of some task distributed among several n… (markdown)
Introducing Hippo A Golang Microservices Toolkit: It all began when I started to build some web services in golang. and everytime I have to create the whole architectu… (markdown)
Leveraging Consul’s DNS Interface: Consul DNS interface allows applications to make use of service discovery without any integration with Consul. For ex… (markdown)
Django Custom Month and Year Lookup: Everyone want to keep Django timezone support but sometimes you need to keep your SQL queries a way from timezone con… (markdown)
Django Custom Lookups: By default Django has a date lookup that support timezones. It actually will wrap your field with CONVERT_TZ in case … (markdown)
Building a Service Mesh with Consul: Load balancers aren’t efficient in a dynamic environment where we scale services up or down. Consul uses a registry t… (markdown)
Getting Started With Consul Service Discovery Tool: Consul is a tool for discovering and configuring services in your infrastructure. It provides several key features li… (markdown)
Docker in a Nutshell: Docker is a set of platform as a service (PaaS) products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in pack… (markdown)
How to Create a Facebook Messenger Bot With Java: Today I’ll show you how to build your own Facebook Messenger Chat Bot in Java. We’ll use Spark Web Framework, Racter … (markdown)
How To Set Up MySQL Master-Master Database Replication: One of the most difficult tasks for software engineers is scaling out the databases incase of large traffic applicati… (markdown)
Build Realtime Apps With Redis PubSub: Last week I worked with Pusher. Pusher is really amazing product to build scalable realtime apps. Also there is slang… (markdown)
How To Install LAMP Stack on Ubuntu: LAMP stack is a group of open source software and it stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. To install them Just r… (markdown)
How to Install Apache Tomcat 8 on Ubuntu 16.04: Tomcat is an open source web server used to serve Java Web Applications and provides a Java HTTP web server environme… (markdown)
Boost Youtube Videos Load Time In WordPress: Although it easy to embed youtube videos but you will be surprised of the increase in loading time of your webpage. (markdown)
My World Feels Different Now!: My heart is shattered. He was taken from us too soon in a car accident. He was my best friend and the most loving bro… (markdown)
Custom Queries with WordPress WP_Query: WP_Query is the heart of WordPress. It gives you a lot of control over the website content as well as holding importa… (markdown)
How to Secure WordPress Plugins: Securing your wordpress plugin isn’t a difficult task or cumbersome because wordpress implements several tools to mak… (markdown)
Working With WordPress wpdb Object: WordPress offers an object that can be used to access data form default tables and custom tables. The $wpdb object co… (markdown)
Adding Menus and Submenus for Wordpress Plugins: Integrating your plugin in wordpress is the first step in building plugins. There are many different ways to integrat… (markdown)
How To Create Wordpress Widgets: Wordpress provides a great API to create and interact with widgets. Widgets are a great way to allow plugin users to … (markdown)
PHP Errors Handling: PHP5 introduced exceptions, a completely different way to handle errors. Simply, exceptions like sensors detect any e… (markdown)
Learning MySQL Aliases: MySQL aliases are simply nicknames used to express tables, columns and functions’ names. These nicknames can be used … (markdown)
Laravel URL Generation: In order to build hyperlinks in our applications. We might do this by hand but laravel provides a number of helpers t… (markdown)
How To Test PHP Classes and Objects: PHP provides a set of functions to test classes and objects. These functions allow you to know more information about… (markdown)
Adding Help Tabs In Wordpress Plugins Pages: Wordpress 3.3 introduces the ability to create custom help tabs in plugin pages. You can use these tabs for plugin do… (markdown)
WordPress Options API: Wordpress provides a set of functions that enable easy access to plugin options. By default wordpress and plugins opt… (markdown)
How To Add Custom Rewrite Rules In WordPress: Wordpress rewrite API used to convert URLs from something programmatically convenient to something user and search en… (markdown)
Kick-Starting MySQL: Today MySQL is one of the most popular open source databases as it supports millions of web applications. We will dis… (markdown)
Working With Laravel Filters: Laravel filters are a set of rules that can be applied before and after routes to change application actions. Also th… (markdown)
Working With Laravel Caching: Caching is a temporary data storage used to store data for a while and can be retrieved quickly. It is often used to … (markdown)
How To Create File Upload With Laravel: We discussed before form creation and validation but file upload input is a bit different. Let’s create our first fil… (markdown)
Learning Wordpress Users API: Wordpress powers many large websites with thousands of users like blogs, applications, social networks and much more…. (markdown)
How To Create Custom Roles For WordPress Users: We discussed before how to work with wordpress built in roles and capabilities. Let’s lead by creating custom roles a… (markdown)
Working With Roles and Capabilities of WordPress Users: Wordpress ships with a powerful roles and capabilities system which control users permissions. Roles enable plugin de… (markdown)
How To Add Fields To WordPress Users Profile Page: We discussed before wordpress users metadata and how it is flexible. Now we will explore how to use metadata in stori… (markdown)
How To Create Custom Validation Rules With Laravel: You don’t need laravel built in validation rules and wish if you could create your own validation rules. Well, fortun… (markdown)
Working With WordPress Users Metadata: Wordpress users metadata used to store additional data related to users. We will discuss how to set, retrieve, update… (markdown)
Working With WordPress Transients API: The wordpress transients API offers a simple and powerful way to store volatile data in database. It is similar to pl… (markdown)
How To Validate Forms With Laravel Part2: We discussed before how to create forms with laravel and then how to build validation rules. Now let’s see how to acc… (markdown)
How To Validate Forms With Laravel Part1: We discussed before form creation with laravel and I think the important thing you need to learn right now is form va… (markdown)
Working With MySQL Unions: MySQL unions used to combine the results of multiple SELECT statements into one result. MySQL supports both UNION and… (markdown)
Working With MySQL Joins: In PHP applications, Retrieving data from relational tables generally require the use of joins. MySQL joins enable de… (markdown)
How To Build Forms With Laravel: In fact, Laravel supports a bunch of handy methods that can handle form creation with ease. We are going to explore t… (markdown)
How To Install Dependencies With PHP Composer: Composer is a dependency management tool for PHP developers. It allows you to define all libraries that your applicat… (markdown)
Laravel Requests and Inputs Part1: Laravel has awesome methods to retrieve, change, create and store request data. It allows you to handle both $_GET an… (markdown)
How To Schedule Events Using WordPress Cron: Cron API is a great feature of wordpress. It allows wordpress to execute certain functions on a schedule. By default,… (markdown)
Laravel ORM Part3: We have discovered eloquent fetching methods in previous parts. It’s time to fine tune query constraints as they add … (markdown)
Laravel ORM Part2: We discussed later how to retrieve rows as objects and perform basic CRUD methods on them. Well,there are other good … (markdown)
Laravel ORM Part1: Laravel is a MVC PHP framework so it ships with its own ORM component called “Eloquent”. Eloquent will take care of r… (markdown)
Laravel Migrations Part2: In Laravel Migrations Part1, I discussed how to create, run and update your migrations. It seems you need more and fo… (markdown)
Laravel Migrations Part1: After building your database schemas ,You should be searching if laravel could give some help and run these schemas …. (markdown)
Working With WordPress Shortcodes: Shortcodes enable developers to embed content that would require alot of complicated tasks. With shortcodes ,you can … (markdown)
Laravel Schema Builder Part3: Once you database tables created ,it is a complex task to update these tables names and their structure .But i think … (markdown)
Laravel Schema Builder Part2: Laravel Schema class have several methods that have varied uses. Let’s take a look at them. (markdown)
Laravel Schema Builder Part1: Does your application need to store data in a database? Well let’s see if laravel will give help. Laravel support MyS… (markdown)
Learning Laravel Views: Laravel like any php framework separate visual aspects of your application from business logic .Before we get started… (markdown)
Laravel Routing: Laravel 4.1 provides us with a handful routing API which can be used for both small and large application .Also with … (markdown)
Working With PHP Interceptors: PHP provides some handful methods which can be used within your classes to intercept messages sent to undefined metho… (markdown)
PHP Packages and Namespaces: Package is a set of PHP classes grouped in some manner .Many developers use file system to organise their application… (markdown)
How To Create Custom Tables In WordPress: WordPress creates 11 tables to store settings, users data, posts data, comments data, links and terms. In many cases … (markdown)
WordPress HTTP API Best Practice: After you fine tuned wordpress HTTP API ,it is the time to put your codes in a larger practice. I thick the best prac… (markdown)
How To Make HTTP Requests with WordPress: In the modern web “means 2.0”, Web applications communicate with each other to gather and share data in between .Your… (markdown)
How To Internationalize Your Wordpress Plugin: Internationalization is the process of preparing your wordpress plugins for use in many languages. although wordpress… (markdown)

Clivern

Pages

Projects

Posts

Optional