Software Engineering

An entire article about the management of lots of repositories that does not mention the word “monorepo” even once.

Emily spitting truth on the way out:

Whatever you think about AI, it should be obvious that falling for any hype, either pro or against something is bad.

An interesting if somewhat rambling history of containers and their effect on software engineering by Justin Cormack who as head of Docker was a key player in this development.

Based also on what Schneier recently wrote about AI security, there’s no real way to secure against these kind of attacks without restricting LLMs to the point of making them much less useful.

Hard to think of something that’s more my jam than this language where you program Haskell by using Turkish grammar constructs.

You can trust the Verge to mostly be right and to rarely pull any punches. That is worth a lot right now.

Like the title says here is a fairly comprehensive overview of how you can store and manage arrays of dynamic size.

More software engineering history is always welcome like here about how Prettier came to be.

Once Google Maps becomes so important to the survival of restaurants it ceases to be a useful tool and becomes a thing to be gamed.

I’m going to make a sign here so I can tap it whenever I run across these misconceptions again.

A great video about Postgres scaling at OpenAI and nice to see that we have run into many of the same problems as they have and are using similar approaches to solving them.

I refuse to use Passkeys because:

Github was an amazing strategic play by Microsoft. It was good for them and for us for more years than I can count.

Not sure what part of this are worth mentioning because I find it so obvious how to build software quickly. Apparently, this is not obvious to everybody.

grug brained development collects a lot of wisdom on software engineering that non-grugs would do well to take to heart.

Written like this it all sounds pretty straight-forward, but:

Instead of being able to carry my digital ID in my phone wallet as is long overdue, here in Europe we just get lots of people going on and on about these or those privacy minutiae.

His father is a university professor. His mother is a physician. Farritor seems to have been a child prodigy whose talents were recognized, encouraged, and incubated almost from the moment he hit puberty. He was supported by both his well-to-do family, his community, and a number of institutions that exist to identify and elevate gifted children.

A somewhat comprehensive suite of benchmarks show that for real workloads you don’t need anything like async Django. Most of the response time in your requests will be used somewhere else.

Bruce Schneier1 looks at agentic AI here as an OODA loop problem which is an interesting way to look at the fundamental limitations of security and decision making in this context.

One of my bigger issues and the reason I’m not bought into the Nix ecosystem: If anything does not work (and many things do not work), you’re going to be hours/days deep into various inscrutable abstractions, trying to fix it yourself.

I missed out on the entire NeoVIM movement and found the entire thing somewhat difficult to get into. Not so much with Helix which just works and is pleasant to use.

After having kicked out Wordpress and moved to a Hugo generated static site, next up are two other useless subscriptions that aren’t doing anything other than costing me money:

Congratulations Django! One of the programming frameworks that has had the most impact on my professional life and has always been nothing other than good to me.

I’ve gone similarly deep on Dioxus more than a year ago as one of the candidate technologies (along with Leptos, Svelte and Gleam) for the long awaited new frontend for Cuppings.

it never works out

Now we see the inevitable walk backs of “coding agents will replace all software engineers”.

When I read the details of the Mongobleed exploit, I gasped. It’s so stunning in its naivete.

Nice to see Amos creating his own Rust open source cinematic universe with advances in a wide area of topics. It’s refreshing to see somebody be skilled at something and then deploying that skill with abandon like here.

I hate Github as much as the next person. A platform with a lot of promise has—in Microsoft’s hands—devolved into a veritable dump.

And with that we are over to a new blogging system. It’s not exactly because blogging is still a thing, but I use this site as a personal content store providing backing for the things that I share. Having it under my control and in markdown is useful.

It’s interesting to see that amidst a lot of scepticism around GraphQL, new projects like Sourcehut will still choose it and clearly argue for it.

Do you want some flashbacks to the horrors of trigonometry? Here’s fizz buzz in cosines.

Dependency cooldowns were the first thing we instituted after tj-actions forced us to hash-pin all the GitHub actions we pulled in. Glad the industry has now also caught up.

AI sales targets are down. Github Actions prices are going up. Most of their software is second tier at best. Microsoft is still, Microsoft.

“RDS goes down too. And when it does, you’re still the one getting paged, you just have fewer tools to fix the problem.”

“AI is expected to approach human reasoning”

Not sure how many people know that this kind of deep data modelling is possible to do in Notion. I love tools with a high skill-cap and Notion is definitely one such.

I am yet to read the Differential Dataflow paper but still interesting to read this explanation of how and why decorrelation works in database engines. LATERAL JOINs and query plans have become something of an interest of mine over the past weeks.

Servo is a massive achievement. One of the more unknown but potentially very impactful things about the project is that its modular nature allows parts of the web rendering stack to be embedded elsewhere (in game engines and such).

Watermarks are just one part of Flink which are difficult to wrap your head around but this interactive explanation does a good job of explaining them. Now for all the other parts of Flink…

A hilarious comedy of errors that is a unique feature of the Javascript ecosystem. When even the simplest code can fail disastrously if you don’t have all the right checks in place.

Spectacular execution of the idea of having a physical terminal through which to input Unicode characters. Real custom keyboard enthusiasts should have one of these on their desk.

Window managers have become a bit of a special interest of mine. After being a Rectangle user for most of my macOS life, I tried out Amethyst and Yabai and finally settled on Aerospace.

“That this sounds radical – that one might believe in a democracy that creates laws, affords companies economic freedom within those laws, and enforces those laws against companies that choose to violate them – says much about our divisive times.”

Good to have explained this explicitly why mathematics is such an essential component of programming. People without an inclination for this kind of abstract mathematical thinking often are poor and chaotic programmers.

Many chefs I know get upset at me when I tell them this. But this is the truth: If you can’t cook everything you make in a microwave thats a skill issue.

This is a fair point not to import code and instead fully qualify what it is that you are using.

Let’s hope Steve Klabnik’s instincts are right a second time round. Seeing the potential of Rust and making it real is already a great accomplishment. If he manages to do the same with jj and get us out of the git/Github mess, that’ll be a spectacular twofer.