In my guise as a Neovim developer, I was recently looking at how vim handles character encoding. This lead me down a rabbit hole that I haven’t seen the end of yet. This article describes what I’ve learned and what’s left to discover.

Some time ago, I created an ad-hoc offsite backup solution for a MySQL database after I recovered it. This happened after a client contacted me when one of their legacy databases blew up. The recovery process was quite painful because the backups that they had were corrupted and incomplete (a monthly cronjob). I ended up with a simple setup that used mysqldump, gzip and rsnapshot to great effect. This article talks about effectively using a similar backup method with PostgreSQL.