Instant Pot spicy pork and mushroom risotto (featuring gochujang)

 

Instant Pot spicy pork and mushroom risotto (featuring gochujang)

This recipe may well "stir up" some controversy with the Italian community out there!
Now we're all familiar with risotto, the famously rich Italian dish. And indeed what's not to like? It has toasted rice, shallots, (usually) mushrooms and grated hard Italian cheese, parmigiano reggiano or gran padano cheese. You can make it with pretty much any protein you like, it's delicious and filling.
And that is great. But as someone who's made risotto a few times the traditional way, it's quite a process. You have to keep stirring the rice constantly and add liquid by the ladle until you get the right consistency on everything. Your stirring arm will hate you for it.
Also most risotto recipes out there concentrate on making traditional Italian risottos with traditional Italian ingredients. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I was thinking "how can I expand the range and make this a bit spicier than the average risotto?"
For this II took inspiration from Korean cuisine and went with gochujang. It's a spicy red pepper paste that's slightly sweetened and fermented You can find it nowadays in most grocery stores, but if you have the chance of visiting an (East) Asian grocery store you should probably get it there. It's often used as a flavor base to make a spicy sauce for korean fried chicken, but today we're going to use it to spice up our risotto.
We're also going to make it all in an Instant Pot. Because the Instant Pot cooks with pressure and not just application of heat to the bottom of a pan, it's not going to burn your rice at the bottom of the tub, and you can add your broth all at once and not worry about standing by the stove for half an hour.
Print Recipe
Prep Time 1 hour
Cook Time 30 minutes
Total Time 1 hour 30 minutes
Course Main Course
Cuisine Italian, Korean
Servings 4 people

Equipment

  • 1 Instant Pot

Ingredients
  

  • 2 tbsp neutral oil I like avocado oil.
  • 1 lb pork, cut in small strips
  • 4 shallots
  • 1/2 lb mushrooms, quartered white button or cremini
  • 4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced or minced
  • 2 tbsp gochujang
  • 1.5 cups arborio or baldo rice don't use other varieties of rice or things won't turn out well
  • 3/4 cup white wine
  • 3 cups chicken broth
  • 1 cup shredded gran padano cheese
  • salt to taste
  • thyme to taste

Instructions
 

  • We're going to start by browning the pork. Set the instant pot to saute on medium heat, add some oil, and brown the meat. Don't crowd the pot or leave it to cook for too long, as the real cooking takes place later when we use pressure.
  • Take the meat out and set aside.
  • Add a bit more oil and throw the mushrooms in there. Mix the mushrooms well so they pick up the oil, add a little salt, and let the mushrooms lose moisture for 8 minutes.
  • Add your shallots to the mushrooms and cook until the shalot pieces are transparent, about 4 minutes.
  • Add the garlic to the pot and keep stirring everything for a couple of minutes.
  • Add the gochujang to the pot. Let it heat up a little at the bottom, and then stir it into the veggies.
  • Add your rice to the pot. Keep stirring so that the rice gets a little darker.
  • Add your wine to the mix. Deglaze the bottom of the pot, and keep stirring the rice and veg mix. Pay close attention and you'll see the wine gradually disappear as it gets absorbed into the wine.
  • When the wine has been absorbed, stop the Instant Pot's saute function.
  • Add the broth to the pot, and then add the pork. Mix it all together.
  • Set the Instant Pot to pressure-cook (manual) for 5 minutes at high heat.
  • Once the cooking time is over, do a quick release. Make sure you don't lean over the Instant Pot when you do that because you can seriously burn yourself with the steam. Open the cover.
  • Add the cheese to the pot, and stir everything together.
  • Add salt and thyme, to taste.
  • Now this is important -- close the cover again (tightly) and let your risotto rest for about 15-20 minutes. this will let a little heat and pressure build up again so that the tastes will be better integrated.
  • Open and serve.

Notes

The gochujang goes well with the pork in terms of flavor, but mostly it adds heat that will linger in your mouth for a while. It's not excessive, however -- but you can experiment with adding more or less gochujang to suit your taste.
Gochujang will also work well with chicken if you prefer that to pork. I'm much less sure how well it would work with beef.
You can also add:
  • some spicy peppers to add a more serious level of spiciness. 
  • spinach or gai lan to add a bit of greens 
  • some people suggest adding cheddar as well as parmigiano/gran padano but I wasn't sure how it was going to mesh with everything in there already, but I might give it a shot in the future.
Keyword gochujang, granpadano, mushrooms, pork, spicy, thyme

Instant Pot spicy pork and mushroom risotto (featuring gochujang)

This recipe may well "stir up" some controversy with the Italian community out there!
Now we're all familiar with risotto, the famously rich Italian dish. And indeed what's not to like? It has toasted rice, shallots, (usually) mushrooms and grated hard Italian cheese, parmigiano reggiano or gran padano cheese. You can make it with pretty much any protein you like, it's delicious and filling.
And that is great. But as someone who's made risotto a few times the traditional way, it's quite a process. You have to keep stirring the rice constantly and add liquid by the ladle until you get the right consistency on everything. Your stirring arm will hate you for it.
Also most risotto recipes out there concentrate on making traditional Italian risottos with traditional Italian ingredients. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I was thinking "how can I expand the range and make this a bit spicier than the average risotto?"
For this II took inspiration from Korean cuisine and went with gochujang. It's a spicy red pepper paste that's slightly sweetened and fermented You can find it nowadays in most grocery stores, but if you have the chance of visiting an (East) Asian grocery store you should probably get it there. It's often used as a flavor base to make a spicy sauce for korean fried chicken, but today we're going to use it to spice up our risotto.
We're also going to make it all in an Instant Pot. Because the Instant Pot cooks with pressure and not just application of heat to the bottom of a pan, it's not going to burn your rice at the bottom of the tub, and you can add your broth all at once and not worry about standing by the stove for half an hour.
Print Recipe
Prep Time 1 hour
Cook Time 30 minutes
Total Time 1 hour 30 minutes
Course Main Course
Cuisine Italian, Korean
Servings 4 people

Equipment

  • 1 Instant Pot

Ingredients
  

  • 2 tbsp neutral oil I like avocado oil.
  • 1 lb pork, cut in small strips
  • 4 shallots
  • 1/2 lb mushrooms, quartered white button or cremini
  • 4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced or minced
  • 2 tbsp gochujang
  • 1.5 cups arborio or baldo rice don't use other varieties of rice or things won't turn out well
  • 3/4 cup white wine
  • 3 cups chicken broth
  • 1 cup shredded gran padano cheese
  • salt to taste
  • thyme to taste

Instructions
 

  • We're going to start by browning the pork. Set the instant pot to saute on medium heat, add some oil, and brown the meat. Don't crowd the pot or leave it to cook for too long, as the real cooking takes place later when we use pressure.
  • Take the meat out and set aside.
  • Add a bit more oil and throw the mushrooms in there. Mix the mushrooms well so they pick up the oil, add a little salt, and let the mushrooms lose moisture for 8 minutes.
  • Add your shallots to the mushrooms and cook until the shalot pieces are transparent, about 4 minutes.
  • Add the garlic to the pot and keep stirring everything for a couple of minutes.
  • Add the gochujang to the pot. Let it heat up a little at the bottom, and then stir it into the veggies.
  • Add your rice to the pot. Keep stirring so that the rice gets a little darker.
  • Add your wine to the mix. Deglaze the bottom of the pot, and keep stirring the rice and veg mix. Pay close attention and you'll see the wine gradually disappear as it gets absorbed into the wine.
  • When the wine has been absorbed, stop the Instant Pot's saute function.
  • Add the broth to the pot, and then add the pork. Mix it all together.
  • Set the Instant Pot to pressure-cook (manual) for 5 minutes at high heat.
  • Once the cooking time is over, do a quick release. Make sure you don't lean over the Instant Pot when you do that because you can seriously burn yourself with the steam. Open the cover.
  • Add the cheese to the pot, and stir everything together.
  • Add salt and thyme, to taste.
  • Now this is important — close the cover again (tightly) and let your risotto rest for about 15-20 minutes. this will let a little heat and pressure build up again so that the tastes will be better integrated.
  • Open and serve.

Notes

The gochujang goes well with the pork in terms of flavor, but mostly it adds heat that will linger in your mouth for a while. It’s not excessive, however — but you can experiment with adding more or less gochujang to suit your taste.
Gochujang will also work well with chicken if you prefer that to pork. I’m much less sure how well it would work with beef.
You can also add:
  • some spicy peppers to add a more serious level of spiciness. 
  • spinach or gai lan to add a bit of greens 
  • some people suggest adding cheddar as well as parmigiano/gran padano but I wasn’t sure how it was going to mesh with everything in there already, but I might give it a shot in the future.
Keyword gochujang, granpadano, mushrooms, pork, spicy, thyme

Revenge of the Naan!

Naan. I didn't take this myself but these look just like mine.

My Daily Bread 2: bigger, longer and uncut

tony
After a site re-host gone awry, my most popular article about making naan bread disappeared. This was a bit of a problem, as I think it's a great and easy way to make great naans. And since I had lost the original recipe I had tried it a few times but it didn't quite work right. So I rethought the entire recipe to improve it, in great part by increasing its size to make 8 naans instead of 6 (bigger), and giving dough more time to rise (longer). The "uncut" was purely a puerile addition on my part.
Print Recipe Pin Recipe
Prep Time 3 hours
Cook Time 15 minutes
Total Time 3 hours 15 minutes
Servings 8 naans

Equipment

  • 1 cast iron griddle Optional, but with one of those you can cook the naans two at a time

Ingredients
  

Dry Ingredients

  • 3 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 1/4 cup unbleached all-purpose flour for making dough easier to handle
  • 2 tsp salt for finishing

Wet Ingredients

  • 1.5 tsp traditional yeast
  • 2 tbsp honey
  • 1 cup warm water (~40C)
  • 1 egg large
  • 1/4 cup kefir yogurt or other plain yogurt
  • 1/4 cup melted salted butter or ghee
  • 1 tbsp butter for finishing

Instructions
 

Bloom the yeast

  • Put the yeast and the honey into a bowl.
  • Add the warm water and mix everything together.
  • Let bloom for 15 minutes.

Prepare the wet ingredients

  • Put the egg and the yogurt in a bowl.
  • Pour the bloomed yeast mixture into the same bowl.
  • Pour the melted butter/ghee into the same bowl.

Prepare the dry ingredients

  • Put 3 cups flour and 2tsp salt into the large bowl and mix together.

Make the dough

  • Pour the bowl of wet ingredients into the bowl of dry ingredients.
  • Mix the ingredients together until combined.
  • When the items are combined, handle the dough into a ball. If the dough is too sticky to handle cleanly, add flour.
  • Cover the large bowl and let rise for 2 hours.

Divide the dough into portions

  • The dough should have roughly doubled in size. Remove the dough ball from the bowl and knead it a little to remove extra air within the dough. Again, if the dough is sticky, use flour to make it manageable.
  • Cut the dough in two pieces, and make a ball out of each piece. Keep doing this until you have 8 roughly equal-sized balls of dough.
  • Place back in the bowl and let rise for a further 30 minutes.

Cook the naan

  • Use a cast-iron pan or (preferably) griddle, on the flat side. Pre-heat on low-to-medium heat for about 15 minutes so the temperature is steady.
  • Cook the naan(s) on the first side for 2 minutes.
  • Flip the naan(s) and cook for 90 seconds.
  • Transfer the naan(s) to a cooling rack.
  • Use a brush to spread melted butter on top of the naan(s).
  • Sprinkle a little pinch of salt on top of the buttered naan.
  • Once the naans are sufficiently cool to handle, place them in a bread box.

Notes

My recipe certainly is not low-fat, I prioritize taste. If you absolutely want you can replace the butter with a neutral oil, but this will affect the taste.
Something else that will affect the taste is the type of honey you use to bloom the yeast. Try several varieties and see for yourself!
Also make sure you use grain salt and not salt flakes for the dry ingredients mix. Salt flakes will not mix well with the flour and create salt "hotspots".
Naans go great with whatever you put on them, really, especially when they have that nice fluffy texture. One thing I used to do is use them to make little pizzas and lahmajouns. You can also spread garlic spread ("toum") on a warm naan for a super-tasty snack, but be mindful of your breath afterwards.

Goodbye to Proton Mail…

I’ve been a subscriber to Proton Mail for over 4 years now, but I won’t be renewing my subscription, which is coming up in the next couple of months. Like many subscribers my primary interest was to make my email more secure and private than I would get with other providers, but the company’s CEO sees this interest in security and privacy as “loser thinking”.

So, why would I spend more money in a service that has now decided to abandon the principles which are the entire reason why I subscribed in the past? And for what? for AI vibe-coding. A serious, leading product is literally being turned to shit. Well Andy, you can pay for slop out of your own pocket. You’ve lost my money, and that of thousands of other subscribers.

That’s the cost of arrogance and greed. Another reason to abandon the project is that employees have been summoned to “re-interview” on their AI skills to keep their existing jobs, which frankly sounds like a fancy way of expressing “constructive dismissal”, a process by which an employer hounds employees into quitting. That’s just a downright scummy thing to do, and as someone who’s spent the entire year looking for employment I am absolutely disgusted by this move. Yes, those “re-interviews” have been cancelled — as a result of public backlash. If Andy Yen thinks that this is enough to keep me as a customer, he’s got another thing coming. Only his resignation from the company could even get me to reconsider at this point. He is not someone that can be trusted.

And trust is what Proton used to have. It was the selling point. It’s not so much that I’m quitting Proton — it is Proton and its CEO that have quit my patronage.

MASS HYSTERIA! WEB VULNERABILITY!

We’re currently seeing about 2 security exploits in a web programming language and kind of framework known as PHP.  “The whole web could be forced to go dark!” some say, “70% of the internet could be affected!” This is alarmist nonsense, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at tech reporting.

Well, since no one else feels like being the sober man at the table, I will.

The security exploits

AI-assisted cybersecurity researchers, while going through code that probably dated back to the 1990s, managed to find two instances in existing PHP code where a very specific condition would lead to an ability by attackers to execute code on a server. That is known as a RCE vulnerability. Two of those were found in existing PHP code. For historical context, PHP was created in 1994 as “personal home page tools” by Rasmus Lerdorf.

To put it in very simple terms, an attacker could put a web site (or, more likely, web host) in a condition where the PHP server framework would just quit unexpectedly. And a failure at that point means that there is a very small opportunity of time where an attacker could execute code arbitrarily on the underlying operating system. Now that code could do anything, including decrypting passwords held in memory and then using those credentials to gain access to external systems. Obviously not a situation you want to be in.

Now, PHP has changed greatly since 1994, which is, let’s remember, 32 years ago, and software testing has as well. However with the use of AI tools, researchers were able to point out exactly what the conditions of the exploit could be found.

Initially the new vulnerabilities were meant to be kept secret until October 22nd. However, someone leaked the story, on October 21st, which set off the tone of panic.

The problem had already been found and, patched, with new, safe versions being ready for use, by the time the information was made available to the public.

So that’s 90% of the problem solved already. The remaining 10% is deployment.

This is things can become complicated. Not for most sites which are regularly maintained, but for legacy sites, which are often left to languish without maintenance but keep working as web sites, “as long as it works”. PHP, as a development language, has created a lot of those sites, largely because it’s an easy and accessible languages for creating dynamic web sites.

Those sites can still represent a problem because the patch that resolves the RCE issues was issued only for the current versions of PHP, which are all decimal versions of PHP 8. As such any site running previous versions of PHP (7 and below) would still be vulnerable. And with AI-assisted coding tools it could be easy to create a way to trigger the conditions for the RCE and insert malicious code into those sites. Those servers need to be updated to PHP8, if they’re even maintained at all, or their owners risk being liable for damage or system intrusions that originate from their servers.

That being said, those sites are not of particular concern.

Why the “crisis” is overblown

While the RCE vulnerability is serious, it’s a problem that’s resolved at the system administration level. For a lot of sites that are served through a shared web host, the site owner does not have to do anything. In fact the owner will probably already have received a notification that the system has been patched to a safe version of PHP.

For people (like myself) who use their own host to serve PHP pages — I do it through a cloud provider, but it’s the same process for people serving from their own bare-metal servers — it’s a simple matter of updating PHP at the host level. In that case it involves a little more work on the site owner’s part, but the fixed PHP versions have been available since the afternoon of October 21st. That’s when I patched my host.

No other change is required, the web app does not have to be modified in any way. The change implemented by the patch works purely at the level of PHP’s internal workings and has no other effect.

That’s why I can’t understand companies that have taken their entire site offline for extended periods as a result of the vulnerability. Once the patch is applied, you restart the system and things work as they previously did. That’s all.

Alarmist tech journalism is the real problem here. Unless you run your own web server, there is no cause to be alarmed. If you do run your own web site, maintain your system. That’s all there is to it.

A follow-up on my bug report about the CRA careers site

A couple of weeks ago I reported that there was a bug on the Canada Revenue Agency web site. To recap, if you just go to the CRA site, follow the link to “Job Opportunities”, and then click on the candidate registration link, you get an error message: “the session has expired”. And if you try and repeat the process, you get a different error message. Basically it seems impossible to register as a candidate for jobs through the CRA web site.

Oddly enough yesterday I figured out how to get around that problem, more on that later. But earlier today, at 3:09am, I got a github message about it. It seems that someone did in fact look at my article, probably from seeing it posted on LinkedIn, and at least tried it out. Now this brings up the interesting question as to whether the Canadian federal government is outsourcing its IT work to India, because 3am is not considered “working hours” anywhere in Canada, but that’s a question for another day.

Here’s a screenshot of the message I got:

github follow-up

First of all, thanks for confirming it’s a bug. But it’s disappointingly lazy to say “well, it’s not my job” in response. It’s a bug that affects the usability of the site, it shouldn’t just get closed (which it did), and if it’s “not your job” it really should be passed along to the people whose job it is to fix it.

Secondly, it’s not even a difficult bug to figure out, and I know that because I figured it out by myself yesterday. And I’m not even getting paid to do this. Which is even more annoying, speaking as someone who’s been looking for a job in the IT field for 8 months now and will probably have to go work on the shop floor at Costco because the tech job market is absolute shite at the moment in Montreal (mind you, if you do have to work in a retail establishment, Costco is the gold standard there).

But, let’s get back to the matter at hand.

It’s the “candidate registration” page that’s broken. It simply will not work if you didn’t sign in to the CRA careers site before you get to it. If you go to the CRA Careers site you will see this near the top of the page:

sign in or register

Click on the “Sign in or register” link, sign in through your authentication partner (or CRA ID), and THEN click on the “candidate registration” link, and you will be able to fill out your candidate profile. 

The easiest way to fix this would be to disable the fields in the “candidate registration” landing page if the user is not logged in, and inform the user that they must be logged in before continuing.

However, it appears that the web dev teams at the CRA operate in silos, where each team is responsible for small individual parts of the site while remaining blissfully unaware of what the other teams are doing. Those teams are probably offshore, working for different companies, and have no clear way of communicating with one another. I don’t know what happened to the “Canada First” and “Elbows up” attitude that the Prime Minister keeps talking about, but it doesn’t seem to apply to IT work done for the federal government. That’s a shame, because there are thousands of Canadian IT workers currently desperately looking for jobs, running through their EI, and eventually forced to apply for welfare at the provincial level. If I’d been in that same situation 20 years ago I would have just looked for employment in the USA, or somewhere else in the world, but that’s no longer an acceptable (in the case of the USA) or even possible option for a guy my age.

So, CRA, I’ve figured it out for you. Fix your damned web site!

An experiment in hiring in 2026 – an epilogue

I thought that the little experiment in recruitment fraud finding, which I started on Sunday, would be done and over after yesterday’s update, but as it turns out there was more to uncover.

Checking my email this morning I found three more emails in my inbox! Each one as dodgy as the four I already mentioned.

One of them came to me from someone claiming to be from the “Robert Walters” recruitment agency, but the domain of the email was “robertwaltters.com”. Which obviously is a typosquatting tactic that works if you don’t pay attention to these “little” details.

Another came from a Gmail account, but a very funny one. The account that originated the scam was [name].[company].sgourmetpizzaa@gmail.com. I mean, come on. This guy was barely even trying. The interesting thing is that this came as a message that used Gmail “Confidential Mode”, which I thought was a scam until I read up on it and found that it actually exists. Nevertheless the only people I’ve seen using that feature are recruitment scammers, so I must add it to the already long list of “tells” of recruitment scams.

The third also came to me via Gmail “Confidential Mode”, and claimed to be from Northrop Grumman. Now that is a big company involved in aviation, so why would they be relying on free gmail addresses? FWIW the address they used was [lastname].[firstname].northrop.grumman@gmail.com.

So, stay vigilant my employment-seeking friends. The vultures out there know there are lots of bodies ripe for pickin’. In more positive news I did score an interview tomorrow. For Costco. I haven’t worked there for 35 years, but hey, it’s a job.

An experiment in hiring in 2026: the unsurprising conclusion

See part 1 of this exciting experiment here!

Unsurprisingly, all four “new connection” recuiters turned out to be scammers. I noticed that 3 of them no longer have LinkedIn accounts, and I just reported the fourth one.

The game is this: these “people” (probably AI bots) pretend to be “independent recruiters” who have a job you’d be interested in. This can be sniffed easily enough from your profile. They give you a little spiel about they’re impressed by your qualifications and experience and you’re almost sure to get the job… BUT they want to make sure you get picked and your resume could use improvement! And of course they know someone who can do this, for a fee.

What are the tells? Just look at the profile. Low number of connections (for a recruiter in this economy?), their email is a free account (gmail, outlook, yahoo), often they don’t appear in the “recruitment firm” they claim to work at but they follow that company, sometimes they’ll redirect you away from Linkedin messaging and onto a proper custom-domained email account… that’s also a free email account. 1/4 of the candidates in my experiment did this, and probably just didn’t know that Yahoo mail adds branding to the emails they send. Also the custom domain had no web site. For a recruiter. In 2026.

They’ll also be as impatient as a Nigerian scammer — if you don’t answer quickly they’ll keep pinging you on Linkedin, and send reminder emails that say stuff like “looking forward to your feedback”. 2/4 of the scammers “suggested” resume optimization within 2 hours. One of them even showed that my resume had an ATS score of 39%… when all the ATS checkers I used showed high 60s to low 70s.

So, yeah. Looking for a job makes you a huge target for scammers on Linkedin. But at least Linkedin seems to be doing something about it, or at least acting on the reports they get, even on a long weekend. So, there’s something positive to get out of this.

Ultimately, if something seems just a little too good to be true, it’s because it is. The tech job market is absolute shit right now and it’s not about to get better.

An experiment in hiring in 2026

See the exciting conclusion of this experiment here!

I’ve now been looking for employment for 8 months, after 4 month of unemployment last year and an unsuccessful stint at a job I had not applied for but been offered by the manager in charge, which turned out to be a complete shit show. So, I’ve come to know a lot about how companies hire — or, more exactly, DON’T hire — candidates at this time in history.

Along the way I’ve come across a number of sus “recruiters” who take it on themselves to string candidates along, promising jobs that pay a little too well, and try to sell you on “resume reviews” costing hundreds of dollars, while not really having any access or say in hiring decisions and probably not even being recruiters. Now, the thing about scams is that they tend to follow patterns. This is not a field of creative geniuses, and they have a number of tells.

So today I went to LinkedIn, posted a video entitled “Yes, You ARE Getting Auto-Rejected” which is apparently causing a whole lot of controversy in the HR community. A mere minutes later I was contacted by FOUR people claiming to be recruiters who have a job for me. One of them was for a job I had already applied for at the target company, so it’ll be interesting to see what comes from that. Two more advertised a job I had seen in my local job searches but was not a good fit for me for certain specific reasons.

Well, I decided to take the bait and send all four of them my resume, which has already been optimized by Claude AI for ATS performance. As things progress I’ll make follow-ups to track  the progress of these “applications”. So, stay tuned.

Setting up PostgreSQL for use with a Django database — without errors

As a technical writer, there’s something that frustrates me very much — instructions that just don’t work. It really grinds my gears. When I write instructions on how to accomplish a task, something I always make sure to do is actually test the instructions to make sure that they work and lead to the expected result, because when I am following specific instructions and things don’t work it really frustrates me as someone who has ADHD.

So I’m setting up a Django project, and naturally I wanted to use PostgreSQL with the project.  I just don’t like SQLite, it’s something I’m forced to use with Calibre and it causes problems with database portability — I have to have the application on the same host as the database and that’s a pain in the ass.

So I modify the venv in which Django is running and install psycopg2-binary, which has the PostgreSQL bindings for Django, and modify the settings.py file to point to the correct database.

Then I went online and the instructions everywhere are always this:

Log into PostgreSQL as the root user (e.g. psql -U postgres)
In psql:
CREATE DATABASE new_database;
CREATE USER new_user WITH PASSWORD 'newpassword';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE new_database TO new_user;

This does not work! Well, it doesn’t work with PostgreSQL 16 and Django 6. When you go back to your django project, make the migrations, and migrate the project, you end up with this error:

psycopg2.errors.InsufficientPrivilege: permission denied for schema public

The worst part of this is, it’s not a new problem. After searching online, this is something that’s been pointed out for several years, and yet none of the “AI-powered search results” seem to be aware of this. It’s really not changing my opinion that search engine-generated “AI summaries” are crap that no one has ever verified — like most AI generated slop out there.

The missing instruction is that you have to, as the postgres user, log into the new database and ALSO grant the privileges to the public schema of the new database to the new user.

To do this, you must do this in a separate operation from the one that created the database:

Log into the new PostgreSQL database as the root user (e.g. psql -U postgres -d new_database)
In psql,
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES on SCHEMA public TO new_user;

Once you do this, you can perform the database migrations as expected.

It’s really annoying that I even have to write this.  Most search engines now will provide you with instructions that don’t work, and this is directly  due to their decision to pollute their search results with unverified AI slop that just doesn’t work. It’s very frustrating and will probably continue being an issue as long as tech companies continue to insist on burdening the rest of us with this “artificial intelligence” monster they’ve sunk billions/trillions of dollars into, while laying off hundreds of thousands of employees and essentially killing the software job market.

Ghost jobs – old and busted. Ghost interviews – new hotness?

Ghost jobs are a thing, but this week I had a… ghost interview.

Got a call last week about a job for which I had applied. Got a screening interview scheduled on Monday (August 24th) and was amped up for it. It was a Teams call, so I sign on 5 minutes before the interview, and waited.

And waited, and waited. No one else came on the call. I asked in the meeting chat whether the call was mis-scheduled — the person who created the meeting was in Kansas but the other person invited to the meeting was in my time zone. I also emailed the person who booked the meeting. So, not having anything else to do, I waited and browsed the internet during that time. An hour passed, then another 15 minutes, and I signed out.

I then emailed both persons in the meeting to inform them of this and said I was open to rescheduling the meeting anytime this week. I then received an automated response saying the other person on the call was on vacation until Tuesday.

However it’s now been two days and no response. Yes, I checked my “spam” folders just in case. This is not a small company, this is a major company in Canada with a sizeable presence in the USA as well.

It strikes me as rather bizarre that a company would call me to schedule a meeting and then ghost me. It seems really unprofessional. And, for me, quite depressing.