I’m a software engineer, father and wishful amateur surfer. If you’ve come seeking my political views, you’ve found the wrong Fareed.
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I have been probably obsessed with two things in the last few years: Nix as a tool to explore innovative ideas that require the capability to rebuild the world and replacing ELF with SQLite as an executable format. You might have noticed that these two ideas are well suited to each other.
I was pleasantly surprised and happy to see that my article ‘Your executable is a SQLite database’ resonated with people. It is a format I have been thinking about for a while, and the idea seems to have struck a chord with others.
I have spent a large portion of my career working in Java. In that time, you get used to huge classes. New functionality? Just add a new method and field to the class. The cost of each new field is rarely considered. Performance is often considered from a classic computer science perspective by considering asymptotic…
A few days ago I wrote about Rewind VM, a deterministic VM where every run of a Nix build is a pure function of its inputs, thread schedule included! I have been using it to find, reproduce and solve numerous race conditions in Nix builds, but it’s been making me feel a little crazy. What is this superpower, and why…
A problem I experienced when pursuing my PhD and submitting academic articles was that I had built solutions to problems that required dramatic scale to be effective and worthwhile. Responses to my publication submissions often claimed such problems did not exist; however, I had observed them during my time within…
I’ve written a bit about Nix and I still face moments where foundational aspects of the package system confounds and surprises me.
One of the most surprising aspects of the Nix language is that it is lazy, especially if you have never used a lazy language before. This laziness is what makes much of Nixpkgs possible, and its complexity.
I was recently trying to validate some performance improvements related to lld at $DAYJOB and it was a little frustrating to see the improvements in our benchmarks but not in the live-production dashboards.
You’ve likely heard everyone at the office or online proclaim that “K8s has eaten everyone’s lunch!” or that “everything should be in a docker container!”. While there are advantages to the above methodologies; it’s very easy to have cargo-culted their adoption; especially for Kubernetes (K8s). I find the biggest…