541
Why does email development have to suck? – Explaining all the <tr>'s and <td>'s
Email clients have quirks that force you to use <table> elements, inline styles, and follow other bad practices that make development complicated.
542
Hotspot performance engineering fails
Developers often believe that software performance follows a Pareto distribution: 80% of the running time is spent in 20% of the code. Using this model, you can write most of your code without any care for performance and focus on the narrow pieces of code that are performance sensitive. Engineers like Casey Muratori…
543
From Stacks to Trees: A new aliasing model for Rust
Since last fall, Neven has been doing an internship to develop a new aliasing model for Rust: Tree Borrows. Hang on a second, I hear you say – doesn’t Rust already have an aliasing model? I...
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Go 1.21 will (likely) have a static toolchain on Linux
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…
546
Changing the Rules of Rust
In Rust, there are certain API decisions about what is and isn’t sound that impact all Rust code. That is, a decision was made to allow or not allow types which have certain safety requirements, and now all users are committed to that decision. They can’t just use a different API with different rules: all APIs must…
547
Git commands you probably do not need
Ah, git ! Love it, hate it. Few things are as central to the modern software development workflow as source-control management (SCM) tools. Although there have been and still are plenty of alternatives to git in the world of SCMs, none other seem quite as prevalent both in open-source and the enterprise.
548
Some notes on local-first development
How local-first software works: sync engines, CRDTs, replicated databases, developer tools, architecture tradeoffs, and when to use each approach.
549
LuaX: A Lua Dialect with JSX
This site now runs on a custom dialect of Lua.
550
Writing a Simple Garbage Collector in C (2014)
People seem to think that writing a garbage collector is really hard, a deep magic understood by a few great sages and Hans Boehm (et al) . Well it’s not. In fact, it’s rather straight forward. I claim that the hardest part in writing a GC is writing the memory allocator, which is as hard to write as it is to look up…
551
Prolog for data science
I demonstrate a widely applicable pattern which integrates Prolog as a critical component in a data science analysis. Analytic methods are used to generate properties about the data under study and Prolog is used to reason about the data via the generated properties. The post includes some examples of piece-wise…
552
Prompt Engineering: Steer a large pretrained language model to do what you want
Prompt Engineering, also known as In-Context Prompting, refers to methods for how to communicate with LLM to steer its behavior for desired outcomes without updating the model weights. It is an empirical science and the effect of prompt engineering methods can vary a lot among models, thus requiring heavy…
553
An unexpected benefit of unit tests
While I won’t go so far as to diagnose myself with ADD without consulting a doctor, those who know me know I can be distracted quite easily. So recently, I decided to do something a little different with a personal project I started a few weeks ago (link to come). I wrote unit tests. That may seem rather uninspired…
554
The simplicity of single-file Golang deployments
Deploy Go apps as single static binaries with systemd. No Docker, no npm, zero-downtime via socket activation. Modern complexity is often unnecessary.
555
MVC Isn’t MVC
In December of 1979 Tyrgve Reenskaug, an employee of Xerox PARC, published a paper called MODELS-VIEWS-CONTROLLERS about a design pattern he had invented for developing applications with a graphica…
556
Kubernetes is hard
Recently, 37signals unveiled mrsk , a tool developed internally to ease with deployments of their services and an accompanying blog post which sparked a lengthy discussion on Hacker News .
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When deployments are easy, code becomes simpler
You bump into DORA in the wild a lot.
558
Learn Wayland by writing a GUI from scratch
Wayland is all the rage those days. Distributions left and right switch to it, many readers of my previous article on writing a X11 GUI from scratch in x86_64 assembly asked for a follow-up article about Wayland, and I now run Wayland on my desktop. So here we go, let's write a (very simple) GUI program with Wayland…
559
I wrote a string type
I write compilers for fun. I can’t help it. Consequently, I also write a lot of parsers. In systems programming, it’s usually a good idea to try to share memory rather than reuse it, so as such my AST types tend to look like this.
560
Why we need to know LR and recursive descent parsing techniques
A couple of people have asked me for my thoughts on part of an article from Tiark Rompf called (roughly) “ Just Write the Parser ” which advocates the use of recursive descent parsing over more “formal” approaches to parsing, at least in the context of teaching compilers. I’m fairly sure I read this article a couple…
561
What makes developers productive?
Many ingredients go into developer productivity. Some are obvious and easy to measure (build times are an easy example to point to). But I think we tend to miss other important factors, perhaps because they are hard to directly measure. For example, no system collects a number that shows how well each developer…
562
Why You Should Write Your Own Static Site Generator
I rewrote my personal website using basic libraries and the flexibility is incredible.
563
The many faces of DISTINCT in Postgres (2017)
3 interesting uses of DISTINCT in PostgreSQL
564
Reproducible Git Bundles
Describes how to create reproducible and deterministic one-file bundles of git repositories for use cases such as backups.
565
Python Is Easy. Go Is Simple. Simple != Easy
Python and Go have distinct qualities that can complement each other.
566
Role of Algorithms
This is lobste.rs comment as an article, so expect even more abysmal editing than usual.
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My thoughts on OCaml
Since 2013 I’ve had the chance to use OCaml a few times in different jobs, and I got frustrated and disappointed every time I had to use it. I just don’t enjoy writing OCaml.
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Refactoring has a price, not refactoring has a cost
We either refactor continuously as we build features -- paying the price. Or we slowly accumulate cruft until our codebase is impossible to change -- paying the cost.
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OOP in C
The art of good programming depends upon the discipline of the programmer, no matter what language is being used. The purpose of object oriented programming (OOP) is to produce well designed reusable code. In principle OOP can be done in any language, even assembly. This is because all OO language compilers/assemblers…