Vijay T - Technical Blog

Explore the differences between WebRTC and WebSockets—transport, latency, security, scalability—and see which fits video calls, chat, gaming or telemetry.

Overview

WebRTC and WebSockets are both protocols that enable real‑time communication in browsers, but they serve very different purposes and work in fundamentally different ways. This post breaks down their core characteristics, compares them side‑by‑side, and outlines when you should reach for one over the other.

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Quick Reference Table

| Feature | WebRTC | WebSockets |
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A practical guide to choosing SVG or Canvas, with performance limits, benchmarks, optimizations, and hybrid strategies.

Introduction

When building web graphics you have two main rendering options: SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and Canvas (bitmap‑based drawing). Both have strengths, but the number of visual elements you need to display—and how often they change—determines which technology will give you the smoothest, most performant experience.

Below is a practical guide that walks through:

• Why el...

Learn to detect circular $ref loops in JSON Schema for Next.js—using a Set‑based client check and json-schema-ref-parser for server‑side validation.

Detecting circular references in JSON Schema can be tricky, especially when a $ref points back to the root schema ("#").
Below is a practical guide for a Next.js + TypeScript project that shows two approaches:

• A lightweight client‑side detector using a simple recursive walk with a Set to remember visited $refs.
• A production‑grade server‑side solution leveraging the `js...

Step‑by‑step guide to auto‑create isolated preview environments per PR with AWS Copilot and GitHub Actions, including DB schema cloning, secret injection, and automatic cleanup.

Introduction

Deploying preview environments for every feature branch or pull request (PR) is a powerful way to catch bugs early, let stakeholders test new changes, and keep the mainline stable.
With AWS Copilot, you can spin up isolated ECS services, automatically provision the required networking, and expose the service via a public load balancer – all from a simple CLI.

In this po...

Learn how the Outbox Pattern atomically stores updates, guarantees event delivery, retries on broker failures, and routes errors to a dead‑letter queue.

Introduction

In distributed systems, reliably publishing events to a message broker while keeping the underlying business data consistent is a classic challenge.
The Outbox Pattern solves this by persisting events in the same database transaction that modifies the business data, then delivering those events asynchronously.

This post walks through how the pattern guarantees delivery,...

Quick reference to Rust’s core types: ints, floats, bool, char, tuples, arrays, slices, structs, enums, references, String, Option, Result, Vec, pointers.

Introduction

A recent query asked for an overview of the data types that Rust provides. The response covered Rust’s type system in depth, organizing the information into logical categories and illustrating each with concise tables and code snippets. Below is a polished blog‑post version of that answer, suitable for readers who want a quick yet comprehensive reference to Rust’s built‑in and c...

Authenticate Docker with Amazon ECR using the AWS CLI. This guide shows how to retrieve a login token, log in, avoid errors, and push or pull images.

Logging in to Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) with Docker

When working with Docker images stored in Amazon ECR, you need to authenticate Docker with the registry. Below is a concise, step‑by‑step guide to get you logged in quickly and securely.

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1. Verify Your AWS Credentials

Make sure the AWS CLI is configured with an IAM user or role that has permission to access ECR.

Pull times for a 1.3 GB Docker image from Docker Hub vs. Amazon ECR on EC2, with quick speed‑up tips.

How Long Does It Take to Pull a Large Docker Image?

When you work with containers, one of the first things you’ll notice is the time it takes for Docker to fetch an image. A 1.3 GB image isn’t tiny, and the download duration can swing dramatically depending on the environment you’re pulling it into. Below we break down the main variables, give realistic time estimates for both public Docker Hu...

Separate auth logic with pure predicates and reusable higher‑order wrappers, and compose rules using OR/AND operators.

In modern JavaScript/TypeScript applications, logic such as authentication, validation, or feature‑gating often lives outside the core business functions.
A clean way to keep this cross‑cutting concern separate is to use higher‑order functions (HOFs)—functions that receive a function and return a new, wrapped version of it.

Below we walk through a real‑world scenario:

• We have a service m...

Discover quick fixes for slow Next.js builds on macOS: enable Turbopack, upgrade Node, trim transpilePackages, disable security scans, and tune your IDE.

Why Is My Next.js Compilation So Slow on macOS?

If you’ve ever stared at a sluggish terminal while running next dev on your Mac, you’re not alone. A slow development server can cripple productivity, but the good news is that most of the culprits are easy to identify and fix. Below is a step‑by‑step guide that covers the most common reasons for sluggish builds and how to resolve them.

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Explore three ways to add a one‑hour in‑memory cache to Next.js—using node‑cache, a lightweight Map wrapper, or built‑in unstable_cache—and get deployment tips.

Why an In‑Memory Cache in Next.js?

When a page or API route needs data that is expensive to fetch (DB query, third‑party API, heavy computation), caching the result can dramatically improve response times and reduce load.

In a Next.js project you can keep the cached data in the server’s memory, and have it automatically expire after one hour.
Below are three practical approaches, ...

Step‑by‑step guide to install ChromaDB on macOS, run it embedded or via Docker, and create a simple RAG pipeline with OpenAI or local embeddings.

What is Chroma DB?

Chroma DB (often just called Chroma) is an open‑source vector database built specifically for AI/LLM applications.
It stores dense embeddings (vectors) together with arbitrary metadata and provides ultra‑fast similarity search (k‑NN, cosine, inner‑product, etc.).

Feature	Description
Collections	Logical groups of vectors, metadata, and IDs...

Learn how to style server‑side Markdown output with a self‑contained, dark‑mode ready CSS sheet that ensures readability, responsiveness, and a modern blog look—all scoped to a .message wrapper.

Chat Summary

The user converts Markdown to HTML on the server and wraps the generated markup in an element with the class message. They asked for CSS styles that would make the resulting blog post look polished, responsive, and readable (including dark‑mode support). The assistant delivered a comprehensive, self‑contained stylesheet scoped to .message, complete with layout rules, typograp...

Learn how to migrate environment variables to AWS Secrets Manager for ECS tasks using JSON, CloudFormation, CDK, and Terraform, with IAM, rotation, tips.

Introduction

When you run containers on Amazon ECS (Fargate or EC2) you normally inject configuration through the environment block of a task definition.
Those key‑value pairs are stored in plain text inside the task definition, which is fine for non‑sensitive data but not ideal for passwords, API keys, or database credentials.

AWS Secrets Manager solves this problem by keeping ...