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.

This web app displays notes and slides in separate windows,
keeping both synchronised.
It accepts simple, double-width, or double-height PDF presentations:

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

Why 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.

The share_target manifest member allows installed Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) to be registered as a share target in the system's share dialog.

Every 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.

Interesting setup for pet computers. Debian + sway + cage

A somewhat compact implementation of the awk programming language

A fun, hands-on guide to writing your own compiler for a real-world programming language.

I’ve used a lot of tools over the years, which means I’ve seen a lot of tools hit a plateau. That’s not always a problem; sometimes …

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.

Comparison between types of API tokens.

There’s plenty of information out there on how to scale Django to handle numerous requests per second, but most of it…

From Erlang, to Elixir and now, GLEAM!?

piku, inspired by dokku, allows you do git push deployments to your own servers, no matter how small they are.