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.

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.

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.

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.

Interesting setup for pet computers. Debian + sway + cage

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! ⚡

Everything you need to write flexible, future-proof Rust applications using hexagonal architecture.

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.