NotesThis is my journey. It is largely the path I took. I think you could speed run it if you were compelled. I donât think you need to follow every step, but I do think every step is additive.FeedUnfurl
NotesBlindspots in LLMs Iâve noticed while AI coding. Sonnet family emphasis. Maybe I will eventually suggest Cursor rules for these problems.FeedUnfurl
Notes Our services allow users to publish content without needing to install anything. We accomplish this with the SSH tools (rsync, sftp, sshfs) you already have installed on your system. Unfurl
NotesOK, so AI doesnât think the same way that people do. Iâm fine with that. Whatâs important to me is that it can do some work for me, work that could also be done by people thinking. Cars (âhorseless carriagesâ) do work that used to be done by horses running. No one now complains that cars work differently than horses.FeedUnfurl
NotesBy emphasizing documentation as the primary source of truth, establishing explicit linkages between development artifacts, and employing iterative, human-guided prompting, the whole team can harness the power of LLMs while mitigating their current limitations.Unfurl
NotesThis is a long overdue post on iximiuz Labs' internal kitchen. It'll cover why I decided to build my own learning-by-doing platform for DevOps, SRE, and Platform engineers, how I designed it, what technology stack chose, and how various components of the platform were implemented. It'll also touch on some of the trade-offs that I had to make along the way and highlight the most interesting parts of the platform's architecture. In the end, I'll, of course, share my thoughts on what's next on the roadmap. Sounds interesting? Then brace for a long read!Unfurl
Notes"Vibe Coding" might get you 80% the way to a functioning concept. But to produce something reliable, secure, and worth spending money on, youâll need experienced humans to do the hard work not possible with todayâs models.Unfurl
NotesYou might have already heard of a 10x engineer. Probably too often, actually. If there's such a thing as a 10x engineer, surely there must be a 1x engineer, too?
Of course there is! Let's dig into a non-exhaustive list of what qualities make up a 1x engineer.Unfurl
NotesMy son asked if Iâd beaten my game. I explained that Iâd transcended it by creating a mathematical representation of its entire possibility space. He asked if that meant âno.âUnfurl
NotesUsing LLMs to write code is difficult and unintuitive. It takes significant effort to figure out the sharp and soft edges of using them in this way, and thereâs precious little guidance to help people figure out how best to apply them.
If someone tells you that coding with LLMs is easy they are (probably unintentionally) misleading you. They may well have stumbled on to patterns that work, but those patterns do not come naturally to everyone.
Iâve been getting great results out of LLMs for code for over two years now. Hereâs my attempt at transferring some of that experience and intution to you.FeedUnfurl
NotesA steward doesn't jealously guard, or struggle to gain more power. A steward watches what her responsibilities are, ensuring enough to contribute but not so many as to burn out. And she nurtures and cares for the code, to make sure that it continues to serve its purpose. Instead of an adversarial relationship, stewardship promotes partnership: It promotes working with others to figure out how to make the best use of resources, instead of hoarding them for yourself.FeedUnfurl
NotesThe first company to get this will own the next phase of AI development tools. Theyâll build tools for real software instead of toys. Theyâll make everything available today look like primitive experiments.FeedUnfurl
NotesThe tl;dr on this, to prevent SQLITE_BUSY errors even when setting a timeout, donât ever upgrade transactions to read-write. If you know you are going to write in a transaction, use âBEGIN IMMEDIATEâ, or start off with the write. But do read on for why this is so, and how other databases struggle with this problem as well.FeedUnfurl
NotesOur compact signals implementation is inspired by Andrea Giammarchiâs excellent article on signals. If youâre curious about the nitty-gritty, I highly recommend giving it a read.
NotesTo me, all signs point towards software engineering changing radically as a profession to be much more oriented around the what and why of software, and much less around the how. This will cause disruption at a massive scale in the long run. But in the short run, it's just a lot of fun to play with these tools and see what they can do.Unfurl
NotesPersonally, I feel like I get a lot of value from AI. I think many of the people who donât feel this way are âholding it wrongâ: i.e. theyâre not using language models in the most helpful ways. In this post, Iâm going to list a bunch of ways I regularly use AI in my day-to-day as a staff engineer.FeedUnfurl
NotesI feel like half of my social media feed is composed of AI grifters saying software developers are not going to make it. Combine that sentiment with some economic headwinds and it's easy to feel like we're all screwed. I think that's bullshit. The best days of our industry lie ahead.Unfurl
NotesLearn Yjs starts with the basics of Yjs, then covers techniques for handling state in distributed applications. Weâll talk about what a CRDT is, and why youâd want to use one. Weâll get into some of the pitfalls that make collaborative applications difficult and show how you can avoid them. There will be explorable demos and code exercises so you can get a feel for how Yjs really works.Unfurl
NotesSo in this guide weâll walk through setting up the tooling and development environment for building and using WebAssembly in Rust, embedding it in a TypeScript project, review how communication between TypeScript and Rust can happen, then finally how you can debug your WebAssembly directly in the browser and/or your favorite IDE. I will use Visual Studio Code as the IDE and Chrome as the browser, but apart from some debugging options, you can reproduce these in your tool of choice.
NotesThis document is a summary of my personal experiences using generative models while programming over the past year. It has not been a passive process. I have intentionally sought ways to use LLMs while programming to learn about them. The result has been that I now regularly use LLMs while working and I consider their benefits net-positive on my productivity. (My attempts to go back to programming without them are unpleasant.)FeedUnfurl
NotesWelcome to OpenHands (formerly OpenDevin), a platform for software development agents powered by AI.
OpenHands agents can do anything a human developer can: modify code, run commands, browse the web, call APIs, and yesâeven copy code snippets from StackOverflow.Unfurl
NotesThe problem with Advent of Code is that it is a waste of time. Most of the puzzles are in the realm of either string processing (somewhat applicable to programming), logic puzzles (not really applicable to most programming), or stupid gotchas in the input format (annoyingly, very applicable to most programming). So to combat this a lot of people use Advent of Code as an excuse to learn a new programming language that they wouldn't otherwise have a reason to use.Unfurl
NotesA blazingly fast, open-source application server with type-safe APIs, built-in JS/ES6/TS Runtime, Auth, and Admin UI built on Rust, SQLite & V8. Unfurl
NotesThe reason I like makefiles is that they often follow an unwritten convention of implementing the same set of commands to get you up and running. When I find a project I know nothing about, and I see a Makefile file inside, chances are that I can run make or make build followed by make install, and I will get this project built and set up on my computer. Or at least I will get information on other steps I need to include.Unfurl
NotesConventional search methods rely on keyword matching, where the system locates exact words or phrases from the query within documents. This technique can be enhanced to better capture the context and intent behind the user's query, leading to more relevant and precise search results. Semantic search focuses on understanding the meaning and intent behind the query. Combining semantic search with filtersâor additional parameters to narrow the results based on specific attributesâfurther improves accuracy.
In this article, we explore semantic search with filters and demonstrate how you can implement it using pgvector and JavaScript.FeedUnfurl
NotesJSON is extremely popular but deeply flawed. This article discusses the details of JSONâs design, how itâs used (and misused), and how seemingly helpful âhuman readabilityâ features cause headaches instead. Crucially, you rarely find JSON-based tools (except dedicated tools like jq) that can safely handle arbitrary JSON documents without a schemaâcommon corner cases can lead to data corruption!
(blog also has a neato minimap view of the whole entry on the side, like VSCode)FeedUnfurl
NotesAI isn't making our software dramatically better because software quality was (perhaps) never primarily limited by coding speed. The hard parts of software development â understanding requirements, designing maintainable systems, handling edge cases, ensuring security and performance â still require human judgment.
What AI does do is let us iterate and experiment faster, potentially leading to better solutions through more rapid exploration. But only if we maintain our engineering discipline and use AI as a tool, not a replacement for good software practices. Remember: The goal isn't to write more code faster. It's to build better software. Used wisely, AI can help us do that. But it's still up to us to know what "better" means and how to achieve it.FeedUnfurl
NotesSo why did we ditch Fly? In the end it came down to the following four things. Until these are improved, Iâd be unlikely to recommend it for Production⢠work.FeedUnfurl
NotesI recently wanted to experiment with ChromeOS Flex but didnât want to install it on a physical machine. I also was doing this without a USB key, which complicated things slightly.
After some trial and error, there are two non-obvious steps to get the installer running:
Properly mounting the .bin live USB image in a way thatâs accessible to the VM
Setting graphics drivers to something ChromeOS Flex supports, which enables the VM to successfully boot the live USB imageFeedUnfurl
NotesFinally, C# undoubtedly beat all other languages; it's very competitive and has really become a monster. And as expected, Rust continues to do a good job on memory efficiency.
The distance between Go and the others increased. Now Go loses by over 13 times to the winner. It also loses by over 2 times to Java, which contradicts the general perception of the JVM being a memory hog and Go being lightweight.Unfurl
Notes WeSQL is an innovative MySQL distribution that adopts a compute-storage separation architecture, with storage backed by S3 (and S3-compatible systems). It can run on any cloud, ensuring no vendor lock-in. Unfurl
NotesRedis inc, whose core product is the formerly open source Redis in-memory database, has prompted further unease in the community by approaching the maintainers of the most popular Rust client library for Redis with the intent either to control or to fork it.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesIt shouldnât be a radical act because results are better if we can cooperate. And life is better without cult leaders.
How do we tear down parochialism and ego?Unfurl
NotesBy enforcing the lack of local state, we can ensure that state lives somewhere more appropriate - a queue, a database, an object store and so on. This makes coordination significantly easier - shared-nothing services can be thrown away, scaled up and down without having to worry about state.FeedUnfurl
NotesInterestingly, all of the things that used to annoy me about Ruby and Rails now annoy me much, much, much less. I have accepted that there is no perfect language or framework. You just have to know its strengths and weaknesses and deal with them. Luckily, there are some really good frameworks out there for people who want to focus on building a good product. I think Rails is probably one of the best, but there are a lot of other long-lived frameworks with lots of active contributors that are probably just as good. It might still be worth it to choose a more exotic language, framework or to dive in and write your own. If only for the opportunity to learn these kinds of lessons on your own.Unfurl
Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work
An LLM Codegen Hero's Journey | Harper Reed's Blog
Citronics, meet the worldâs first Circular Microcomputers
team pico
Horseless intelligence | Ned Batchelder
Literate Development: AI-Enhanced Software Engineering
Building a Firecracker-Powered Course Platform To Learn Docker and Kubernetes
Verifiability is the Limit
1x Engineer
It's not cheating if you write the video game solver yourself | Robert Heaton
Hereâs how I use LLMs to help me write code
Tailscale is pretty useful | Fatih's Personal Blog
What to do about SQLITE_BUSY errors despite setting a timeout - Bert Hubert's writings
My LLM codegen workflow atm | Harper Reed's Blog
Ignore the Grifters - AI Isn't Going to Kill the Software Industry â Dustin Ewers
Learn Yjs by Jamsocket
Advent of Code on the Nintendo DS
Programming the C64 with Visual Studio Code - Retro Game Coders
Welcome to TrailBase | TrailBase
I Like Makefiles
Implementing Filtered Semantic Search Using Pgvector and JavaScript
Nobody Gets Fired for Picking JSON, but Maybe They Should? ¡ mcyoung
Tabloid: the clickbait headline programming language
The 70% problem: Hard truths about AI-assisted coding
Why we left Fly.io - Chris Arderne
A Web Component to expand or collapse all details elements | Go Make Things
Redis Inc seeks control over future of Rust redis-rs client library, amid talk of trademark concerns ⢠DEVCLASS
Egoless Engineering
Regular Restarts Are Good, Actually
Rewrite it in Rails | old man rambling