Cap'n Web is a new open source, JavaScript-native RPC protocol for use in browsers and web servers. It provides the expressive power of Cap'n Proto, but with no schemas and no boilerplate.

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

Things we wish we didn't know

I have been using IntelliJ Idea at work for a decade or so by now, and it’s been a reliable companion. JetBrains IDEs have a bit of a reputation for being slow, but their feature set is incredible: powerful refactoring tools, a great VCS UI (though I like magit even more!), a huge number of supported frameworks, integration with just about any testing library for any language, code coverage tools, powerful debuggers, etc.

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.

Extra is different than More. Extra is finishing those two screens, but then researching a new library for form validation that might reduce the boilerplate code. Or it's learning ways to protect against common security vulnerabilities from data entry. These little off-ramps from the main highway of Normal Work could be dead-ends and not have any practical value to the project. But they might also be important contributions. And that's the thing with Extra. While the tangible value to the project is uncertain (it could be nothing this time or it could be something), the value to you is real.

This post is all about speculative compilation, or just speculation for short, in the context of the JavaScriptCore virtual machine.

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

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! ⚡

This blog series creates a small operating system in the Rust programming language. Each post is a small tutorial and includes all needed code.

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

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

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

soju is a user-friendly IRC bouncer. soju connects to upstream IRC servers on behalf of the user to provide extra functionality. soju supports many features such as multiple users, numerous IRCv3 extensions, chat history playback and detached channels. It is well-suited for both small and large deployments.

Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. Hare uses a static type system, manual memory management, and a minimal runtime. It is well-suited to writing operating systems, system tools, compilers, networking software, and other low-level, high performance tasks.