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u/Gnadev

r/awardtravel r/selfhosted r/SideProject r/PostgreSQL r/usvisascheduling
PSA - Avianca is awesome! Plus Remember to shop around before paying ridiculous amount of miles/dollars.
▲ 0 r/awardtravel

PSA - Avianca is awesome! Plus Remember to shop around before paying ridiculous amount of miles/dollars.

I wanted to book a last-minute flight to a destination in Northern BC, Canada, from Vancouver, and Air Canada wanted me to pay CA$1,621 for it, or about 91K miles + taxes and fees. I was able to book these exact same flights with United for 35K miles and US$26 in taxes and fees. If I had Avianca miles, this redemption would have cost me 12K miles + taxes and fees!

https://imgur.com/a/6aJh4Ht

u/Gnadev — 1 day ago
▲ 1 r/usvisascheduling

B1/B2 Visa Appointments in Vancouver, Canada for Permanent Residents

Hey everyone, just wanted to share a quick tip for any Permanent Residents trying to get earlier appointment dates.

When you are filling out your profile on the AIS portal, there is a question that should have asked if you are a Canadian citizen or a Permanent Resident. For some reason, this is set to "No" by default. You can only see this question when you click the settings wheel in your portal.

If you are a PR, do not leave it like this! You can call the customer support line and ask the agent to update that specific answer to "Yes" on their end.

Once they make the change, you get routed into a different pool and can see much earlier appointment slots available.

Hope this helps save someone a few months of waiting!

reddit.com
u/Gnadev — 1 month ago
▲ 12 r/PostgreSQL

Scaling PostgreSQL on a $20 repurposed Dell XPS 13 to query 49M raw SEC filings

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a database optimization experience from a side project I've been hacking on. I turned an old 2017 Dell XPS 13 laptop (i5, 8GB RAM, upgraded to a 4TB SSD) into a database server to download, parse, and store raw SEC EDGAR filings.

The dataset currently consists of about 240GB of raw files, parsed into ~49M individual XBRL facts.

Some of the challenges and setup details I wanted to share:
- Database Schema: Structured as a star schema to query ticker-level fundamentals quickly.
- Partitioning: Partitioned the facts table by filing date and concept metric to speed up time-series chart retrievals.
- Disk & Budget Constraint: Because it runs on a single SSD on a consumer laptop plugged directly next to my router, I had to keep write amplification low. I ended up tuning PostgreSQL's autovacuum settings and fillfactor parameters specifically for tables that receive large nightly batch loads from the Python ETL.
- Tunneling: The client is a Next.js app on Vercel that queries this homelab Postgres database over a secure DuckDNS tunnel.

Would love to hear from other Postgres database administrators:
- What autovacuum / WAL tuning settings do you recommend for consumer-grade hardware under heavy batch insert loads?
- Have you run into memory exhaustion bottlenecks with 8GB RAM when handling large joins over tables with 40M+ rows?

reddit.com
u/Gnadev — 1 month ago
▲ 33 r/selfhosted+1 crossposts

Sector SPDR shut down, so I spent 6 months building a clean, visual Yahoo Finance alternative for S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 stock fundamentals directly from SEC filings

A while ago, the Sector SPDR website went offline. For me, it was the perfect tool to cut through the noise—it only showed S&P 500 companies, while every other platform (like Yahoo Finance) shows every public company under the sun, resulting in pure clutter.

Frustrated by the loss of that focus, I spent the last 6 months building a side project to fill the gap.

It's live at research.aerarium.app - a clean, visually appealing fundamentals explorer focused strictly on S&P 500 + Nasdaq-100 companies. Under the hood, it parses ~49M data points directly from raw SEC EDGAR filings on a homelab server, making every single chart number traceable back to its primary source.

What I learned building this in my spare time:
- XBRL is a standard just as English spelling is a standard. Every filer tags things differently; I maintain concept maps per metric with per-ticker overrides and a nightly audit that catches filers who silently rename concepts.
- Data accuracy is a perfectionism trap. I shipped with known gaps and a "suppress rather than show wrong" gate, and nobody has noticed the gaps - but they would have noticed another 6 months of not launching.
- Focus is a feature. Keeping the universe limited to the S&P 500/Nasdaq-100 made it possible to build a clean UI that doesn't feel like a spreadsheet overload.

Free tier: 5 showcase tickers + macro dashboards, no signup. Pro is $10/mo.
This week, Microsoft Copilot started citing one of my 13F pages as a source, which felt like a nice win for a solo side project.

AMA about the pipeline, the stack (Next.js/Vercel + Python/Postgres homelab), or how I kept the motivation going as a side project! Would love some feedback and comments.

u/Gnadev — 1 month ago