20 random bookmarks

2025-08-29

131.

You no longer need JavaScript

lyra.horse/blog/2025/08/you-dont-need-js

An overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome.

2025-07-03

126.

A Higgs-bugson in the Linux Kernel

blog.janestreet.com/a-higgs-bugson-in-the-linux-kernel

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.

2025-06-26

124.

The plan-execute pattern

mmapped.blog/posts/29-plan-execute.html

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.

2025-06-16

118.

CSS Classes considered harmful

www.keithcirkel.co.uk/css-classes-considered-harmful

The solution to all of these problems

I humbly put forward that modern web development provides us all the utilities to move away from class names and implement something much more robust, with some fairly straightforward changes:

Attributes

Attributes allow us to parameterise a component using a key-value representation, very similar to Map<string, T>. Browsers come with a wealth of selector functions to parse the values of an attribute.

2025-06-13

117.

What I talk about when I talk about IRs

bernsteinbear.com/blog/irs

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.

2025-05-06

107.

Debian installation with encrypted BTRFS

chaos.tomaskral.eu/guides/debian-encrypted-btrfs-root

2025-04-24

105.

Instrumenting Axum projects

determinate.systems/posts/instrumenting-axum

2025-02-04

100.

Running a Debian Sid on Ubuntu

blogops.mixinet.net/posts/incus

2024-10-04

80.

Snappy UI Optimization with useDeferredValue

www.joshwcomeau.com/react/use-deferred-value

useDeferredValue is one of the most underrated React hooks. It allows us to dramatically improve the performance of our applications in certain contexts. I recently used it to solve a gnarly performance problem on this blog, and in this tutorial, I'll show you how! ⚡

2024-09-19

77.

Blogging in Djot instead of Markdown

www.jonashietala.se/blog/2024/02/02/blogging_in_djot_instead_of_markdown

2024-09-16

73.

Technical Writing One introduction

developers.google.com/tech-writing/one

2024-08-15

67.

Writing a C Compiler

nostarch.com/writing-c-compiler

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

2024-06-24

51.

Deriving Dependently-Typed OOP from First Principles -- Extended Version with Additional Appendices

arxiv.org/abs/2403.06707

The expression problem describes how most types can easily be extended with new ways to produce the type or new ways to consume the type, but not both. When abstract syntax trees are defined as an algebraic data type, for example, they can easily be extended with new consumers, such as print or eval, but adding a new constructor requires the modification of all existing pattern matches. The expression problem is one way to elucidate the difference between functional or data-oriented programs (easily extendable by new consumers) and object-oriented programs (easily extendable by new producers). This difference between programs which are extensible by new producers or new consumers also exists for dependently typed programming, but with one core difference: Dependently-typed programming almost exclusively follows the functional programming model and not the object-oriented model, which leaves an interesting space in the programming language landscape unexplored. In this paper, we explore the field of dependently-typed object-oriented programming by deriving it from first principles using the principle of duality. That is, we do not extend an existing object-oriented formalism with dependent types in an ad-hoc fashion, but instead start from a familiar data-oriented language and derive its dual fragment by the systematic use of defunctionalization and refunctionalization. Our central contribution is a dependently typed calculus which contains two dual language fragments. We provide type- and semantics-preserving transformations between these two language fragments: defunctionalization and refunctionalization. We have implemented this language and these transformations and use this implementation to explain the various ways in which constructions in dependently typed programming can be explained as special instances of the phenomenon of duality.

2024-06-14

31.

CAUSAL.AGENCY(7)

causal.agency

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.

2024-06-13

18.

An easy-to-implement, arena-friendly hash map

nullprogram.com/blog/2023/09/30
15.

OpenBSD extreme privacy setup

dataswamp.org/~solene/2024-06-08-openbsd-privacy-setup.html

In this article, you will learn how to install and configure OpenBSD to reduce its network activity over clearnet

14.

Optimal SQLite settings for Django

gcollazo.com/optimal-sqlite-settings-for-django

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

2024-06-11

10.

Self-serve dashboards

briefer.cloud/blog/posts/self-serve-bi-myth

Sales pitches are the only place where “self-serve dashboards" work. In the real world, it's a different story.

Why "business" people don't use metabase/power-bi.

9.

Exploring Gleam, a type-safe language on the BEAM!

christopher.engineering/en/blog/gleam-overview

From Erlang, to Elixir and now, GLEAM!?

7.

NetBSD 10 on a Pinebook Pro laptop

www.idatum.net/netbsd-10-on-a-pinebook-pro-laptop.html

I've been running NetBSD on a RockPro64 since NetBSD 10-BETA, and I'm still happy with it now with NetBSD 10-RELEASE. I'm always looking for hardware to hack NetBSD though, and I recently watched a FOSDEM 2024 video: NetBSD 10: Thirty years, still going strong!. The Pinebook Pro laptop was mentioned at one point, which has the same RockChip SoC as the RockPro64. That reminded me I'd been wanting to give this inexpensive ARM 64 laptop a try.