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Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
How we overvalue the wrong technology and novel aspects of interface design at the expense of substantial gains to our productivity.
Brandur Leach
I'm Brandur. This site is where I publish words and photos. The section updated most often is atoms , short multimedia particles reminiscent of a Twitter feed. I update my now page monthly according to what I'm working on and thinking about. I publish a newsletter as often as I can.
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Visit brandur.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News May 2017 – Aug 2026
Software Engineering 27Databases & Data 20Tech Industry & Business 7Systems & Performance 6Career & Management 4Web & Frontend 3
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Soft deletion probably isn't worth it
The traditional soft deletion pattern using <code>deleted_at</code> columns leaks into code, curbs the usefulness of foreign keys, and makes data removal difficult. Luckily, there’s an alternative.
3
In Pursuit of Production Minimalism
Practicing minimalism with the lofty goal of total ephemeralization to build coherent, stable, and operable stacks.
4
How Postgres Makes Transactions Atomic
A dive into the mechanics that allow Postgres to provide strong atomic guarantees despite the chaotic entropy of production.
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River: A fast, robust job queue for Go and Postgres
Introducing River, a Postgres-based job queue designed for resilience and correctness through strong transactional guarantees.
6
Fast, Safe, and Complete(ish) Web Service in Rust
A detailed look at the frameworks, concurrency model, error handling, middleware constructs, and testing strategies of a web service written in Rust.
7
How We Went All In on sqlc/pgx for Postgres and Go
Touring the ORM and Postgres landscape in Go, and why sqlc is today’s top pick.
8
Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
How to format blog content so it’ll last.
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100 days with Rust: a series of brick walls
A few thoughts on Rust after a few months of regular use.
10
Easy, alternative soft deletion: `deleted_record_insert`
An alternate to traditional <code>deleted_at</code> soft deletion that stays out of the way and minimizes bugs.
11
Meta Layoffs
Words from Mark Zuckerberg on management and remote work.
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How to Manage Connections Efficiently in Postgres, or Any Database
Hitting the limit for maximum allowed connections is a common operational problem in Postgres. Here we look at a few techniques for managing connections and making efficient use of those that are available.
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Redis Streams and the Unified Log
Building a log-based architecture that’s fast, efficient, and resilient on the new stream data structure in Redis.
14
Postgres UUIDv7 and per-back end monotonicity
How Postgres’ v7 UUIDs are made monotonic, and why that’s a great feature.
15
Single dependency stacks
Life with Postgres only.
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Scaling Postgres with Read Replicas and Using WAL to Counter Stale Reads
Scaling out operation with read replicas and avoiding the downside of stale reads by observing replication progress.
17
A Missing Link in Postgres 11: Fast Column Creation with Defaults
How a seemingly minor enhancement in Postgres 11 fills one of the system’s biggest operational holes.
18
The minimum viable unit of saleable software
LLMs made software cheaper to build, but not free. A look at the new buy-vs-build math of the LLM age, and the pricing zone where small software businesses can still survive.
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Scaling a High-Traffic Rate Limiting Stack with Redis Cluster
Flattening a single very hot vertical Redis node into a horizontal Redis Cluster at Stripe.
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Living APIs and the Case for GraphQL
Why it makes sense to model APIs as graphs, and what GraphQL can do for us to help with discovery, batch operations, and gradual enhancement.
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Go Is a Great Fit for Lambda
Why Go’s stability and simple deployments is a good fit for a serverless environment.
22
The notifier pattern for applications that use Postgres
Maximizing Postgres connection economy by using a single connection per program to receive and distribute all listen/notify notifications.
23
The disproportionate influence of early tech decisions
On how software that survives first encounter with production tends to live longer than we think it should.
24
Implementing Stripe-Like Idempotency Keys in Postgres
Building resilient services by identifying foreign state mutations and grouping local changes into restartable atomic phases so that every request can be driven to completion.
25
Heroku: Core Impact
It’s been a rough month for Heroku. On April 15th, they opened a security notice that’s been active ever since – the status page, designed for incidents measured in hours rather than days or weeks, dutifully reads off a duration of “478 hours, 9 minutes” 1 .
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Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?
Almost every notable managed Postgres provider bundles a connection pooler, giving us a strong hint that connection management is a product problem rather than a user problem.
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My Heroku values (2015)
Some of my favorite practices and ideas from almost four years at Heroku.
28
Sorbet and 100% cov makes Ruby refactoring possible
Safely refactoring Ruby traditionally involves many incremental steps and feature flags. Sorbet and 100% branch coverage make it possible to refactor a lot of code safely.
29
Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?
On looking for alternatives to Slack culture.
30
Short, friendly base32 slugs from timestamps
~4 lines of Go to produce succinct, stable, URL-friendly slugs from timestamps.