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3 lines of code shouldn't take all day
Reflections on my time at Electronic Arts and techniques used to improve iteration times in video game development
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How to implement a hash table in C
An explanation of how to implement a simple hash table data structure, with code and examples in the C programming language.
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PostGIS at 20, the Beginning
Twenty years ago today, the first email on the postgis users mailing list (at that time hosted on yahoogroups.com) was sent, announcing the first numbered release of PostGIS. The early history of PostGIS was tightly bound to a consulting company I had started a few years prior, Refractions Research. My first contracts…
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DNA seen through the eyes of a coder
Updates: 12th of September 2021: I’m writing a book on DNA! If you want to become a beta reader, or have suggestions, I’d love to hear from you! 8th of January 2021: This article has been revised and updated, scientifically and in terms of dead links. Revision made by Tomás Simões (@putadagravidade /…
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How C++ Resolves a Function Call
C is a simple language. You’re only allowed to have one function with each name. C++, on the other hand, gives you much more flexibility: You can have multiple functions …
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Maybe we could tone down the JavaScript (2016)
I’m having a really weird browser issue, where scripts on some pages just won’t run until about 20 seconds have passed. Whatever you’re about to suggest, yes, I’ve thought of it, and no, it’s not the problem. I mention this not in the hope that someone will help me debug it, but because it’s made me acutely aware of a…
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Why is my Rust build so slow?
I’ve recently come back to an older project of mine (that powers this website), and as I did some maintenance work: upgrade to newer crates, upgrade to a newer rustc, I noticed that my build was ta...
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Go 1.16 will make system calls through Libc on OpenBSD
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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I don't want to learn your query language (2018)
This is a bit of a rant but I really don't like software that invents its own query language. There's a trillion different ORMs out there. Another trillion databases with their own query language. Another trillion SaaS products where the only way to query is to learn some random query DSL they made up.
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How fighting games use delay-based and rollback netcode (2019)
I would like to thank krazhier and Keits for taking hours out of their busy schedules to discuss technical aspects of netcode with me, and Sajam for taking time to answer interview questions and being supportive throughout the writing process. I would also like to especially thank MagicMoste for making all the…
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Comparing Svelte and React
Last year I created Pomodone , a small time tracking application based on the Pomodoro technique of working in 25 minute intervals. It's a pretty basic app; it has a 25 minute timer (that runs in a Web Worker) and saves a history of your "poms" to a small Firebase database. I initially built it using React (well…
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Programmers, teach non-geeks the true cost of interruptions (2014)
Interruptions are one of the biggest sources of inefficiency for programmers. Now, to be fair, they’re probably a big source of inefficiency for everyone, but relatively speaking, they’re worse for programmers. To understand what I mean, let’s take someone whose job is in sales. A lot of the day is probably spent on…
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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.
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Peter Naur's view of programming
To answer this question, let me take you a few years back, when I worked with a small high tech startup. We were working on a pretty complex augmented reality system spanning all layers from low-level computer vision components to cross-platform mobile and web apps. Especially for the lower-level components, a good…
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Ray Tracing in pure CMake
A simple ray tracer written in pure CMake
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Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time
How to format blog content so it’ll last.
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Writing a register based VM in less than 125 lines of C code
This tutorial is intended for intermediate C developers who want to get some coding practice and, in the process, gain valuable insights into low-level programming and how (some) Virtual Machines operate under the hood. The reader should already be comfortable with bitwise operations, hexadecimal notation, pointers…
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CVE Stuffing
I monitor the @CVENew Twitter feed to keep up with any interesting new vulnerabilities that are released. On December 11th CVE-2020-29589 was published claiming that “the kapacitor Docker ima…
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User power, not power users: htop and its design philosophy
This short story is not really about htop, or about the feature request that I’ll use as an illustration, but about what are the core principles that drive the development of a bit of software, down to every last detail. And by “core principles” I really mean it.
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Docker, Django, Traefik, and IntercoolerJS: My go-to stack for building a SaaS
Candid and colorful thoughts on enterprise readiness2021289 points343 commentsSoftware Engineering details
I provide a deeper-dive on the tech stack I like to use in 2021. It is simple, easy to work with, and allows you to grow out of it when the time comes. Updated for 2021!
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The Importance of Humility in Software Development (2020)
Technical Web Development Blog
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Things I wish Git had: Commit groups
Everyone 1 and their dog 2 loves Git. I know I do. It works, it’s efficient, it has a brilliant data model, and it sports every feature under the sun . In 13 years of using it, I’ve never found myself needing a feature it didn’t have. Until recently.
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“Computer science is not about computers”
Edsger W. Dijkstra? Alan Perlis? Jacques Arsac? George Johnson? Donald Knuth? Matthew Dennis Haines? Anonymous?
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GitHub Stale Bots – A False Economy
Stale Bot’s are a type of automated bot on Github, which locks issues which are “stale” (as in have no recent activity). This seems like a helpful tool at first, but in reality it’s terrible for all p
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Complexities of e-mail validation logic
Nope, you don't know how to validate an email address. Even if you think you'd get the domain part right, fuggeddabout the local part. Seriously.