2025-08-25
Everything I know about good API design
www.seangoedecke.com/good-api-design2025-07-31
A dive into open chat protocols
wiki.alopex.li/ADiveIntoOpenChat2025-07-03
A Higgs-bugson in the Linux Kernel
blog.janestreet.com/a-higgs-bugson-in-the-linux-kernelWe 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.
2025-06-26
The plan-execute pattern
mmapped.blog/posts/29-plan-execute.htmlI 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.
2025-06-13
What I talk about when I talk about IRs
bernsteinbear.com/blog/irsI 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.
2025-05-30
The PGP Problem
www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problemWhy do people keep telling me to use PGP? The answer is that they shouldn’t be telling you that, because PGP is bad and needs to go away.
2025-05-15
Writing that changed how I think about PL
bernsteinbear.com/blog/pl-writingEvery so often I come across a paper, blog post, or (occasionally) video that completely changes how I think about a topic in programming languages and compilers. For some of these posts, I can’t even remember how I thought about the idea before reading it—it was that impactful.
2024-12-31
Idiosyncra
exple.tive.org/blarg/2024/12/29/idiosyncraInteresting setup for pet computers. Debian + sway + cage
2024-12-20
Visitor Pattern Considered Pointless - Use Pattern Switches Instead
nipafx.dev/java-visitor-pattern-pointlessIn 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.
2024-12-17
Building GBA Games in Rust
shanesnover.com/2024/02/07/intro-to-rust-on-gba.htmlUsing Nix to Try Tools
entropicthoughts.com/using-nix-to-try-tools2024-09-19
Blogging in Djot instead of Markdown
www.jonashietala.se/blog/2024/02/02/blogging_in_djot_instead_of_markdown2024-07-09
Using use in Gleam
erikarow.land/notes/using-use-gleam2024-06-24
Counting Immutable Beans: Reference Counting Optimized for Purely Functional Programming
arxiv.org/abs/1908.05647Most 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.
2024-06-13
Solving SAT via Positive Supercompilation
hirrolot.github.io/posts/sat-supercompilation.htmlArena allocator tips and tricks
nullprogram.com/blog/2023/09/27OpenBSD extreme privacy setup
dataswamp.org/~solene/2024-06-08-openbsd-privacy-setup.htmlIn this article, you will learn how to install and configure OpenBSD to reduce its network activity over clearnet
2024-06-11
Go evolves in the wrong direction
valyala.medium.com/go-evolves-in-the-wrong-direction-7dfda8a1a620Go programming language is known to be easy to use. Thanks to its well-thought syntax, features and tooling, Go allows writing easy-to-read…
Hard disagree on this one, but still interesting.
2024-06-10
Modern IRC Client Protocol
modern.ircdocs.horseLiving specification of the IRC protocol. Does not include brand new behavior, just existing behavior present in IRC software and/or networks (new extensions are IRCv3's area).
2024-06-09
Piku
piku.github.io/index.htmlpiku, inspired by dokku, allows you do git push deployments to your own servers, no matter how small they are.