I feel uneasy about design patterns.
On the one hand, my university class on design patterns revived my interest in programming.
On the other hand, I find most patterns in the Gang of Four book to be irrelevant to my daily work;
they solve problems that a choice of programming language or paradigm creates.

My litmus test of a good design pattern is its cross-disciplinary applicability.
I’m more likely to accept an idea that pops up in fields beyond software engineering.
And the most convincing patterns are the ones that help me in everyday life.

This article describes a universal pattern that billions of people rely on daily, but software engineers rarely discuss—the plan-execute pattern.

Things we wish we didn't know

Games can be made in many different ways. Many games are made using big, general purpose game engines such as Unity and Godot. I enjoy using the Odin Programming Language combined with Raylib.
Odin is a C-like programming language and Raylib is library for drawing graphics, checking input and playing sounds. So it’s just a program that uses a simple library, no engine!
There are no objectively best ways to create games.

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

In modern Java, the visitor pattern is no longer needed. Using sealed types and switches with pattern matching achieves the same goals with less code and less complexity.

Reading through the Emacs 30 NEWS file and picking
out the stuff I think is the most interesting.

Permacomputing is both a concept and a community of practice oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in computer and network technology inspired by permaculture.

A lightning post on logic programming in Haskell to construct a workout weekly schedule given the set of exercises, days and constraints.

A write-ahead log is not a universal part of durability

Most functional languages rely on some garbage collection for automatic memory management. They usually eschew reference counting in favor of a tracing garbage collector, which has less bookkeeping overhead at runtime. On the other hand, having an exact reference count of each value can enable optimizations, such as destructive updates. We explore these optimization opportunities in the context of an eager, purely functional programming language. We propose a new mechanism for efficiently reclaiming memory used by nonshared values, reducing stress on the global memory allocator. We describe an approach for minimizing the number of reference counts updates using borrowed references and a heuristic for automatically inferring borrow annotations. We implemented all these techniques in a new compiler for an eager and purely functional programming language with support for multi-threading. Our preliminary experimental results demonstrate our approach is competitive and often outperforms state-of-the-art compilers.

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

I make mostly IRC software in C. I like OpenBSD but also the GPL. I just want to read books and try to learn to be kinder. When I can I'd like to talk to strangers and experience more magic.

This article presents the program earlyoom to prevent a Linux system to lock up in low memory situations.

From Erlang, to Elixir and now, GLEAM!?