April update

Unsurprisingly with a newborn and a very sticky 3 years old at home, I haven’t been doing much in the past 3 weeks. Since I stopped working on it, I’ve released my thematic crossword generation app, Prosettr, to a complete (and expected) indifference (zero traffic came from the HackerNews announcement, and I got about 10 likes from LinkedIn). Oh well, it was a fun project anyway and I’m quite happy with the result!

When getting ready for release I was considering my hosting options - GCP Cloud Run kind of rugged pull me with their CPU and memory quotas being way too low! And I was not going to beg them for a quota increase. Luckily, Fly.io saved the day with their super easy to use fly machines. My app requires a lot of CPU and memory (4cpu, 16 Gb of RAM) in very short bursts - just a few seconds when the user is doing a solve. I made a simple “controller” endpoint that starts and stops “solver” machines on demand, for that. The Fly.io API was a pleasure to work with, and it’s nice to be able to connect via a wireguard network.

Here is the code of the controller endpoint for later reference: Fly.io controller endpoint in go. With that, I get a fleet of solver machines (I scaled to 8), and a single controller machine start them and proxies the websocket connection. I put it together in an evening and was pleased with the results. Fly machines really do start in a few milliseconds! I’ll use them in my next project, whatever that may be.

Moving on, VSCode finally released their MCP support! I’ve been eyeing MCP stuff for a while but I didn’t have a MCP client (think Claude Code or Cursor) to play with. Now I have one with Copilot Agent! I asked our Infra team to enable the Copilot “Preview Features” for our organization, otherwise the MCP Servers didn’t appear in the list somehow.

I followed a video tutorial on youtube and got the Postgres MCP working locally. It seems promising, I’ll have to play more with it.

I’ll close with a generated image of Nvidia’s CEO as a lego figurine, the new ChatGPT image generation rocks!