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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
2
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.
5
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.
9
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
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.
12
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.
13
Single dependency stacks
Life with Postgres only.
14
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.
15
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.
16
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.
17
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.
18
Go Is a Great Fit for Lambda
Why Go’s stability and simple deployments is a good fit for a serverless environment.
19
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.
20
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.
21
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.
22
Short, friendly base32 slugs from timestamps
~4 lines of Go to produce succinct, stable, URL-friendly slugs from timestamps.
23
Actix Web: Optimization Amongst Optimizations
It’s already been a great reading day for retrospectives on the last ten years / predictions for the next. Here’s to hoping that everyone had a good break (or at least a few days off), set or didn’t set resolutions, and is refreshed and ready for what comes next.
24
Postgres Job Queues and Failure by MVCC
How Postgres’ concurrency model coupled with long-lived transactions can degrade the performance of indexes on hot tables in your database.
25
First Contact with SQLite
I've been playing around with SQLite the last couple of days. I thought I knew a little about SQLite, but I didn't, and am getting my remedial education through an accelerated gauntlet. Some of what …
26
Error stack traces in Go with x/xerror
A workaround to get nice stack traces for errors in Go.
27
What's good about offset pagination; designing parallel cursor-based web APIs
Offset pagination gets a bad rap because it’s backend inefficient, but it’s actually a nice feature from a consumer’s perspective. How to bring those advantages to cursor-based APIs.