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.

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.

In functional programming,
combinator libraries refer to a design style that emphasizes bottom-up program construction.
Such libraries define a few core data types
and provide constructors—functions that create initial objects—and combinators—functions that build larger objects from smaller pieces.

Combinators enable the programmer to use intuitive visual and spatial reasoning
that’s vastly more powerful than linear language processing.
As a result, solving problems with combinators feels like playing with lego pieces.

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.

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

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

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

Featureful zsh prompt.

Last year I finally decided to learn some Rust. The official book by Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols is excellent, but even after reading it and working on some small code exercises, I felt that I …

Living specification of the IRC protocol. Does not include brand new behavior, just existing behavior present in IRC software and/or networks (new extensions are IRCv3's area).