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A new blog for 2024
DX engineer at Liveblocks. Articles on developer experience and web engineering.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,433 posts.
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Signs you're about to be acquired (2020)
Over the course of my tech career thus far, I’ve been through two acquisitions. In each case, I was just a normal employee without any special inside knowledge, and found out only a few days before the deals were publicly announced. In retrospect, however, there were some clear signs in the weeks leading up to the…
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A simple way to scale pixel art games
Previously in How to present MS-DOS screenshots , I encouraged readers to take the original pixel aspect ratio into account when showing pictures of old games. There’s also a subtler issue to consider: the blur analog display systems had.
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A quick look at OS/2's builtin virtualization
A while ago, someone on the fediverse mentioned "OS/2's virtualization features" to me. I don't remember who it was, sorry. I had the chance to take a look at this today.
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Create More, Consume Less (2021)
The problem with too much consumption is that it can leave us feeling utterly empty inside. Ironically, it creates something: One big void. A small dose of creativity is good for us. It can help us become more present, less anxious, and much more fulfilled. And it doesn't take much to live a creativ
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Reverse Engineering Protobuf Definitions from Compiled Binaries
How to extract raw source protobuf definitions from compiled binaries, regardless of the target architecture
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Baby’s Second Garbage Collector
This blog post is meant to an iteration on the tutorial and introduction to garbage collection implementation presented in this classic blog post . We are still working with simple garbage collectors, but this time another one with a bit more complexity.
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An unordered list of things I miss in Go
I like Go. I think it is a reasonable good language , and has some good qualities that makes up for its flaws. However, this doesn't mean I think the language couldn't be better, far from it.
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Things engineers believe about Web development
I wrote most of this post sometime in 2022 but I think it holds up alright in 2024 so I decided to publish it for posterity. I don’t really like doing posts like this—I’d much rather share some innocuous learnings or tips but it turns out I have opinions too 😓 Sorry! 2024-02-21: I’ve added a few reflections at the end…
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The Linux audio stack demystified (and more)
Digital audio processing is a complex yet fascinating subject. Getting a deeper understanding requires knowledge in multiple technical disciplines, including physics, electrical/electronical engineering, and some software engineering when it comes to parts of the Linux ecosystem. This article aims to demystify the…
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On Being a Senior Engineer (2012)
I think that there’s a lot of institutional knowledge in our field, especially about what makes for a productive engineer. But while there are a good deal of books in the management field about “expert” roles and responsibilities of non-technical individual contributors, I don’t see too many modern books or posts that…
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Perfectionism – one of the biggest productivity killers in the eng industry
It can cause immense stress and can lead to burnout 🤯 Don't worry, we're sharing our mistakes, so hopefully you'll avoid some!
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How (and why) to run SQLite in production
This is my personal site, where I write about Ruby, programming, and any of my varied fascinations.
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Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem
My best guesses as to why our early stage data startup failed. This isn’t a retrospective, but something closer to advice for past me. Or maybe just exorcism.
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We don't need a DAC on the ESP32-S3
There's no DAC on the ESP32-S3 - but that's not a problem - we'll just use PDM!
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Byte Interviews the Apple Lisa Dev Team (1983)
A behind-the-scenes look at the development of Apple's Lisa.
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Postgres as a Search Engine
Build a retrieval system with semantic, full-text, and fuzzy search in Postgres to be used as a backbone in RAG pipelines.
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Lessons learned from profiling an algorithm in Rust
Recently, I've been working on a new approximate nearest neighbor search algorithm called RaBitQ . The author has already provided a C++ implementation that runs quite fast. I tried to rewrite it in Rust (yet another RiiR). But I found that my implementation is much slower than the original one. Here is how I improve…
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Fixing a knockoff Altera USB Blaster that never worked
What follows is the story of how I fixed not one, but two, different flawed Altera USB Blaster clone devices that never worked correctly after I bought them.
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ESP32: leaving love notes and entering demoscene territory (2022)
I’ve been tinkering with arduino-like platforms recently (more on the midi synth soon) and got the idea to make a small message board to leave notes to my girlfriend. This is how I ended up with a simulator, an integration with a demoscene tracker, custom tools to make palette cycling effects, having to learn CAD to…
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The Rise of the Forever Renter Class
On those who are unable or unwilling to buy a house in 2024 and what to do about it.
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30% of Children Ages 5-7 Are on TikTok
And why did youth mental health problems accelerate after 2010?
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Cool URIs can be ugly (2023)
Around last year this blog, a simple static site, was running on GitHub pages, together with Cloudflare in front of it due to (perceived) unreliability with GitHub’s SSL provisioning for custom domains. In order to simplify my stack, I tried running it on Cloudflare Pages .
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How to think about software quality (2022)
Not a weighty meandering 300 page Zen dialogue on Motorcycle Maintenance. Merely a meandering blog post in which one contemplates /Quality/ of software products.
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Floats Are Weird
Compute this limit more accurately with one weird trick!
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Billion file filesystem
For a lark I made an ext4 file system with a billion empty files. https://gitlab.com/larswirzenius/create-empty-files has the program I wrote for this. I've done this before , but this time I made it a little simpler for me to do it again: everything in one Rust program rather than clunky scripts.
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The Guide to Stock Options Conversations
Why every manager should talk to their employees about stock options
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Dungeons and Dragons turns 50 today
I'm very interested in the history of Dungeons & Dragons , but I'm not a historian – especially when compared to someone like Jon Peterson. ...