Automerge is a local-first sync engine for multiplayer apps that works offline, prevents conflicts, and runs fast.

I started writing this post because, for whatever reason, I keep forgetting what the difference is between a ring and a group, which is funny to me because I never forget the difference between a semiring and a semigroup – although other people do, because it’s quite easy to forget! So, I wanted a fast reference to the kinds of algebraic structures that I am most often dealing with in one way or another, usually because I’m writing Haskell (which has some reliance on terminology and structure from abstract algebra and category theory) or I’m trying to read a book about category theory and they keep talking about “groups.” Wikipedia, of course, defines all these structures, and that’s fine, but what I need in those times is more of a refresher than an in-depth explanation.

We recently ran across a strange higgs-bugson that manifested itself in a critical system that stores and distributes the firm’s trading activity data, called Gord. (A higgs-bugson is a bug that is reported in practice but difficult to reproduce, named for the Higgs boson, a particle which was theorized in the 1960s but only found in 2013.) In this post I’ll walk you through the process I took to debug it. I tried to write down relevant details as they came up, so see if you can guess what the bug is while reading along.

Things we wish we didn't know

I just learned that
you can use it to review a git commit like this and I thought that was really
cool.

I have a lot of thoughts about the design of compiler intermediate representations (IRs). In this post I’m going to try and communicate some of those ideas and why I think they are important.

Storage for private, distributed, offline-first applications. Earthstar is a specification and JavaScript library for building connected applications owned and run by their users.

Security testing starts with understanding vulnerabilities. The CVE website lists known software flaws. The OWASP Top Ten highlights common weaknesses. With this knowledge, we can improve our Go development. This article shows how to put in place robust practices. They are to: fuzz inputs, verify dependencies, and use static analysis tools (SAST).

I recently wrote about Async Pool, one of my favorite JavaScript / TypeScript helpers, and today I want to share an even simpler yet extremely useful utility

plainweb is a framework using HTMX, SQLite and TypeScript for less complexity and more joy.

In this post, I talk about pleasant but seemingly minor features in personal sites

A single-user “wiki” engine powering the ThoughtStorms wiki.

Last year I finally decided to learn some Rust. The official book by Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols is excellent, but even after reading it and working on some small code exercises, I felt that I …