I’ve come to accept that I’m just a sucker for shiny nerd things. I use Rust, despite never having had a professional reason to use it in my life. I switched to Linux in my student years and I’ve never looked back since, even though it constantly breaks and I can’t get my Bluetooth headphones to connect. I have a…
This post covers the same material as my !!Con 2024 talk , for which the slides are here .
Since this article will probably have more reach than my usual rambling, It'll be written in English (but let's not make a habit of it).
How are Rust, C++, and Python trending on Hacker News in the job market? As a proxy measure for programming language trends, let’s analyze the frequency of programming language mentions in the mont…
On multi-core programming, not as a special-case technique, but as a new dimension in all code.
Stephen Wolfram investigates the discovery of structures since the Game of Life was invented--searching possibilities versus invention by explicit effort. A thorough look at oscillators, modularity, glider guns.
After 4 years with Apple's TextKit 2: The promised 'better' text engine has unstable scrolling, unreliable height estimates, and viewport issues so bad that even Apple's TextEdit suffers from them. Good architecture, but the implementation makes it frustratingly difficult for real-world apps.
In this article, we will discuss zippers in the Clojure language. These are an unusual way to work with collections. Using a zipper, you can traverse a data structure arbitrarily and modify its content as well as search in it. A zipper is a powerful abstraction that pays off over time. However, it is not as…
About two weeks ago I entered a discussion with the docs.rs team about, basically, why we have to look at this: When we could be looking at this: And of course, as always, there are reasons why thi...
Why most memoization is downright useless...
I spent 3 weeks earlier this year digging in to and reimplementing the lossless compression algorithm in Fuji’s RAF Camera RAW files. This post discusses the fundamentals of how it works.
Spoiler : it is also likely already the best BZip2 encoder for a given block size. See the green charts below. Note for subscribers: if you...
Here are 5 factors that make a bigger difference to software development outcomes than “A.I.” coding assistants, but teams don’t address because they’re “old news, gra…
CVE-2025-7783 is a very recent vulnerability affecting a lot of applications in the Node.js ecosystem including those which use axios or the deprecated request library. In all honesty, this vulnera…
Static Single Assignment is a program representation where each “variable” (though this term can be misleading) is assigned exactly once. Mostly the variables aren’t variables at all, but instead names for values—for expressions. SSA is used a lot in compilers. See this lesson from Cornell for converting Bril to SSA…
The challenge, simulate millions of particles in golang, multi-player enabled, cpu only, smart tv compatible.
Left & Mutual Recursion Mitigation
I have a lot in the works for the this month's Logic for Programmers release. Among other things, I'm completely rewriting the chapter on Logic Programming...
We begin by writing a few helper functions that will invariably prove useful to us later. We will be dealing with a lot of rectangular regions on the screen, so it makes sense to start by defining a rectangle structure and write some code to manipulate it.
How many CSS selectors and declarations do we need to produce the Fizz Buzz sequence? Of course we could do this with no CSS at all simply by placing the entire sequence as text in the HTML body. So to make the problem precise as well as to keep it interesting, we require that all text that appears in the Fizz Buzz…
In this post, I’ll explain how I compiled an OCaml program to run on a TI-84+ CE calculator. 🐪
In the past I used AI code editors for all of my programming, but I stopped using it and recommend others to consider this as well
The answer is "very often"
We run a multi-tenant Rails application with sensitive data and layered authorization. In this post, I walk through how I added the first AI agent tool using RubyLLM, Pundit policies, and our existing Algolia search, without introducing a parallel system or loosening constraints.
I've created a new format for encoding real numbers on computers. I'm proud of it! Let's dive in.
Discussion on notions of software complexity as defined by Rich Hickey, John Ousterhout and Zach Tellman.
In this essay, I will perform the logical fallacy of argument from authority (wikipedia.org) to attack the notion that large language model (LLM)-based generative "AI" systems are capable of doing the work of human programmers.
It's a justifiable copout, but it's still a copout.
