Automerge is a local-first sync engine for multiplayer apps that works offline, prevents conflicts, and runs fast.

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.

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

Take control of your honks and join the federation.
An ActivityPub server with minimal setup and support costs.
Spend more time using the software and less time operating it.

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.

Storage for private, distributed, offline-first applications. Earthstar is a specification and JavaScript library for building connected applications owned and run by their users.

In 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.

Solving AoC on the DS with Rust.

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

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.

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