Complete health checks and why they matter

Standard health checks tell you if an app is running but not if it’s actually working. Complete Health Checks go deeper, verifying dependencies like databases and caches to catch issues early and keep deployments smooth. In this article, we’ll cover why they matter, how to set them up, and the key differences between liveness and readiness checks—so your services stay reliable and efficient in production. What are health checks and why are they so useful Having an application that performs some kind of processing is only the first part of the journey....

March 11, 2025 · 9 min · 1751 words · Theo "Bob" Massard

Watermarking pictures (fast) using Pillow and Libvips

Working in the media processing industry, I very often encounter 2 concepts: adding overlay to images and doing it fast. As I’m very much interested in tackling this problem well enough and using proper tooling for performance efficiency, I explored several options that allow watermarking pictures. Code is available at github.com/tbobm/watermarking-images-for-fun-and-profit Watermarking pictures To put things back in context, watermarking is the act of applying an overlay to a media. This can be performed through many different operation and is used to apply branding, establish ownership, or limit usage to a specific audience 1....

November 13, 2024 · 7 min · 1279 words · Theo "Bob" Massard