NotesOur compact signals implementation is inspired by Andrea Giammarchi’s excellent article on signals. If you’re 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 don’t feel this way are “holding it wrong”: i.e. they’re not using language models in the most helpful ways. In this post, I’m 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. We’ll talk about what a CRDT is, and why you’d want to use one. We’ll 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 we’ll 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 yes—even 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 filters—or additional parameters to narrow the results based on specific attributes—further 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 JSON’s design, how it’s used (and misused), and how seemingly helpful “human readability” 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 schema—common 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 – understanding requirements, designing maintainable systems, handling edge cases, ensuring security and performance – 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, I’d be unlikely to recommend it for Production™ work.FeedUnfurl
NotesI recently wanted to experiment with ChromeOS Flex but didn’t 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 that’s 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 shouldn’t 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
NotesGatus was made to monitor everything, in every possible way. HTTP, GraphQL, DNS, ICMP/PING, TCP, certificate expiration, you name it. While checking the response status may be enough for some use cases, Gatus goes much further and allows you to add conditions on the response time, the response body and even the IP address.Unfurl
NotesA more effective abstraction is conceptualizing vector embeddings not as independent tables or data types but as a specialized index on the embedded data. This is not to say that vector embeddings are literally indexes in the traditional sense, like those in PostgreSQL or MySQL, which retrieve entire data rows from indexed tables. Instead, vector embeddings function as an indexing mechanism that retrieves the most relevant parts of the data based on its embeddings.FeedUnfurl
NotesIn this post I described the new --update-refs feature for rebasing in Git 2.38. I introduced the concept of stacked branches and stacked PRs, and why I like them for feature development. Unfortunately, keeping stacked branches up to date can be quite arduous, requiring a lot of tricky rebasing. with --update-refs the commands are significantly simplified, as I showed in various scenarios. You can even enable --update-refs by default, so that all your rebases use it!FeedUnfurl
NotesI want to help bring about new ways of being in the world, however small. New ways to think. New ways to create. New ways to share ideas with others. FeedUnfurl
NotesPlans get complicated, so we just charge based on usage. Pick and choose which pieces you need for your application; that’s all you’ll see on your invoice.Unfurl
NotesThe metrics-based autoscaler scales an app’s Machines based on any metric, such as pending work items or queue depth. Scaling on metrics other than requests or connections is useful for apps, like background workers, that aren’t running web services. Apps with services that need to scale based on HTTP requests can use the built-in Fly Proxy autostop/autostart feature for Machines.Unfurl
NotesTo share our insights, we've created the Nine Node Pillars– nine guiding principles for creating robust, scalable, and maintainable Node applications in enterprise environments.This guide can be used as a checklist to identify gaps in your current practices and prioritize areas for improvement.Unfurl
NotesWordPress Playground public API allows you to run and control an entire WordPress stack in your browser. You can use it to build an entirely new kind of a web app, like an in-browser WordPress IDE we built at CloudFest Hackaton 2023. In this post, you will learn how to get started. Unfurl
NotesTurns out, many JavaScript testing frameworks don’t yet support native ES modules out of the box, and I was struggling to find an easy solution that didn’t require transpiling my code back to ES5.Unfurl
NotesI set out to find a Linux-only solution to cross compile for macOS using osxcross. A weekend of pain later, and I have the following post. Hopefully it spares you a weekend of your own pain.FeedUnfurl
NotesThis layman explanation is exactly, how I would describe it. Indeed, cel shading is rendering of the diffuse light channel. Texturing, and rendering. I know that light is a component of the material, and not something to be rendered, but using LUTs, we can achieve exactly this.Unfurl
NotesBASIC wasn’t designed to change the world. “We were thinking only of Dartmouth,” says Kurtz, its surviving co-creator. (Kemeny died in 1992.) “We needed a language that could be ‘taught’ to virtually all students (and faculty) without their having to take a course.”Unfurl
NotesAre we just trying to solve a problem quickly, or are we trying to build a robust solution? I got into programming at least in part because it seemed like the closest thing to magic that really exists. So I’m going to call these two distinct styles wizarding and engineering.FeedUnfurl
NotesI was recently figuring out how to use nvm, and one thing that stood out to me is that I needed to set the default version of node that I wanted to use when opening a new tab.FeedEmbedUnfurl
My LLM codegen workflow atm | Harper Reed's Blog
Ignore the Grifters - AI Isn't Going to Kill the Software Industry — 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
Status Page On Demand | Gatus
Vector Databases Are the Wrong Abstraction
Working with stacked branches in Git is easier with --update-refs
Why make software? | Sean Voisen
Stricli | Stricli
Expr | Expression language
JSON Functions And Operators
The Nine Node Pillars - Platformatic HQ
Cross compiling Rust from Linux to macOS
Fifty Years of BASIC, the Language That Made Computers Personal | Time
Learn Multi platform 6502 Assembly Programming... For Monsters!
Programmer as wizard, programmer as engineer
Set default node version with NVM – Eric Binnion