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My failed attempt to shrink all NPM packages by 5%
It seemed like a great idea at first.
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AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why
Metr recently published a paper about the impact AI tools have on open-source developer productivity[^1]. They show that when open source developers working in codebases that they are deeply familiar with use AI tools to complete a task, then they take longer to complete that task compared to other tasks where they…
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Gemini 3 for developers: New reasoning, agentic capabilities
Gemini 3 is introducing advanced agentic coding capabilities, plus Google Antigravity, a new agentic development platform.
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Tilde, My LLVM Alternative
I'm Yasser and I've made it my mission to produce an alternative to LLVM, the current king of compiler backend libraries. I'm calling it Tilde (or TB for tilde backend) and the reasons are pretty simple, i believe it's far too slow at compiling and far too big to be fixed from the inside. It's been 20 years and cruft…
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</> Htmx – The Fetch()ening
You know, technically, I never said anything about a version *four*
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Twenty Eighth International Obfuscated C Code Contest
IOCCC Year 2024
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Making games in Go: 3 months without LLMs vs. 3 days with LLMs
After 15 years as a software engineer, I realized I had never actually built and published a game.
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PDF to Text, a challenging problem
The search engine has recently gained the ability to index the PDF file format. The change will deploy over a few months. Extracting text information from PDFs is a significantly bigger challenge than it might seem. The crux of the problem is that the file format isn’t a text format at all, but a graphical format. It…
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I ruined my vacation by reverse engineering WSC
describing my wsc adventure
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Compiler Explorer and the promise of URLs that last forever
How we're preserving 12,000 legacy links as Google's URL shortener rides into the sunset
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TIL: timeout in Bash scripts
How to use the `timeout` command to terminate processes after a specified time and how to combine it with `until` for smarter shell scripting.
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Self-contained Python scripts with uv
You can add uv into the shebang line for a Python script to make it a self-contained executable.
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A better build system for OCaml
A “build system” is one of the most important tools in a developer’s toolbox. Roughly, it figures out how to create runnable programs from a bunch of differe...
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Formatting code should be unnecessary
and we knew this back in the 80s
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Field Notes from Shipping Real Code with Claude
Note: This post comes with a NotebookLM podcast (1linked at the bottom), and three generated audio recordings. You can read the conversation I had
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Asciinema CLI 3.0 rewritten in Rust, adds live streaming, upgrades file format
News about asciinema development and new releases
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Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful
When talking about REST, it is worth reading the dissertation of Roy Thomas Fielding. The original paper that describes RESTful web, “Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures” Roy T. Fielding (2000), introduces the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style as a…
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I know when you're vibe coding
I shouldn't have to care about this. I don't want to care about how someone's code gets into the IDE. Whether you wrote it by hand, copied it from a forum, prom
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Emacs Lisp Elements
This book, written by Protesilaos Stavrou, also known as ‘Prot’, provides a big picture view of the Emacs Lisp programming language.
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Automerge 3.0
A new major version of Automerge, which cuts down memory usage by more than 10x while preserving backwards compatability.
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Redis is fast – I'll cache in Postgres
There are books & many articles online, like this one arguing for using Postgres for everything. I thought I’d take a look at one use case - using Postgres instead of Redis for caching. I work with APIs quite a bit, so I’d build a super simple HTTP server that responds with data from that cache. I’d start from Redis…
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Switching from Pyenv to Uv
Premise The 0.4.0 release of uv does everything I currently do with pip, pyenv, pipx, pip-tools, and pipdeptree. Because of that, I'm in the process of switching to uv. This blog post covers switching
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I tried Gleam for Advent of Code
A 12 day Advent of Code year convinced me Gleam is the real deal, thanks to Rust-like errors, great pipes, and surprisingly ergonomic FP.
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Writing an LLM from scratch, part 13 – attention heads are dumb
A pause to take stock: realising that attention heads are simpler than I thought explained why we do the calculations we do.
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Debugging an Undebuggable App
This app has a surprising number of anti-debugging protections. Let's figure out how to bypass them.
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Making Postgres slower
As an respectable unemployed person must do, I tried to make Postgres as slow as possible
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Writing an operating system kernel from scratch
Exploring a minimal implementation of a time-sharing kernel on RISC-V, implemented in Zig, on top of OpenSBI.
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I didn't reverse-engineer the protocol for my blood pressure monitor in 24 hours
The personal website of James Belchamber.