Making the body text incredibly thin in the name of design is a crime against humanity. Too old to read this crap.

Gave two talks: 1. Go interface segregation redux (Blog + writing the talk + slides + prepping took 2w) 2. Letting claude code loose on your infra (prep time 2 hrs) 1st one garnered 130 views on YT in 3w. 2nd one is an internal talk that got 2k views in 7 days. m.youtube.com/watch?v=-P-e...

"It's not just X. It’s also Y." is the new em dash. Once you start seeing it, it's impossible to unsee.

I think about this tweet sometimes. Especially with our company-wide mandate to use Go and the constant "why not x" pushback.

I'm looking for a/multiple co-host(s) for go podcast(). The show turned 4 years this month and I'd like some freshness for the next phase. There's a post in /r/golang if anyone's want to know more. Podcasting is hard, and I'll admit that I'm not the most consistent host, but I want to continue.

Maybe it's time to pick up some graphQL, oh well, never mind.

Zoomers who can't figure things out in classic games are EXACTLY the same as Boomers who don't know how to work a smartphone, but in reverse. Y'all have been playing Yellow Paint: The Game too much.

Neat. But FYI, it's strongly consistent in a single region. Still eventually consistent across regions. aws.amazon.com/blogs/archit...

I've posted my latest recap of the world of databases: www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/... All the hot topics from the last year: • More Postgres action! • MCP for everyone! • MongoDB gets litigious with FerretDB! • File formats! • Market movements! • The richest person in the history of the world!

Stockholm subway cars have a couple of cool easter eggs, if you know where to look for them.

​One of the advantages of being a millennial is that by the time these short-form videos started becoming a thing, I was already considered too old for the platforms. So, I ended up never downloading them. But watching my cousins use their phones like zombies - ngl, I’m a tad bit worried.

You know we're at the peak when you start seeing HR folks adding "GenAI enthusiast" to their LinkedIn profiles.

Ted Chiang's writing is a joy to read. Too bad he doesn't write as much. Probably also why his pieces are so thought provoking. Reading Exahalation and the first story - The Merchant & the alchemist's gate - immediatey reminded me that you don't need to build a world to tell a good story.

Observability folks - besides the typical Z-score (3 stddev) alert, what else are you measuring to capture latency variation? ​Since stddev is sensitive to outliers in long-tail dists, has anyone tried the new MAD function in Prometheus to calculate a modified Z-score? How does it behave?

Google's SRE book from a decade ago holds up surprisingly well today. But boy, some chapters are a slog to go through - especially the parts that talk about org processes. ​Even so, making the book freely available on the web was one of the best things that could've happened to the practice.

Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software. Just fuck you. Fuck you all. I can't remember the last time I was this angry.

The problem with slop is that the prompt weaver genuinely believes they’re spitting fire instead of cornball after cornball. ​The inability to discern hit from shit and a helpless submission to pandering mediocrity drive the willingness to let LLMs do the thinking.

For me, '25 was the year of surviving AI slop at work: reviewing generated RFCs from aspiring staffs, drowning in nonsense from 10xers, & losing respect for folks that can't write a slack msg w/o AI. But hey, I was able to ignore mcp/agentic bullshit but still pickup some non-AI skills w/ LLMs.

Apart from the typical Golden Signals (RED & USE), figuring out what to measure is harder than how to measure it. The metrics story typically goes like this: - we record count, duration, & histogram - make dashboards from them - something goes wrong & we add new metrics post hoc - rinse & repeat

Aside from traces, the OTEL SDK is worse than the native clients for both metrics & logs. ​In Go, the Prom client is way better than the OTEL metrics SDK. The OTEL API isn't as ergonomic or optimized as its native counterparts. Logging is unstable. ​I guess that's the price of standardization.

Michael Lynch (@mtlynch.io) has compiled here a wonderful list of essays about software that influenced him. The ones I’ve read (and I’ve read a few before) have all been very good.

I love speaking at small local meetups, mostly because I feel a bit less lost and the hallway conversations tend to be better (IMO). Spoke at the Berlin GDG Go Meetup this December, and the talk just went live. www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtSu...

Art.

O11y hasn't yet been formalized like other SWE practices (OO, FP, CI/CD). Staring at a zillion dashboards to piece things together is still hard. GopherCon US recordings are dropping! Felix packed so much good info into a 25-min talk on leveraging critical path analysis for better trace analysis.

Rewriting a service in a new stack is always fun, but IME migration stories are brutal. They require a ton of planning and grunt work. I've been part of a few. While the process depends on the stacks involved, 'tap compare' comes up often for validation. rednafi.com/system/tap-c... #golang

Similarly, I don't want LLMs to eat up the fun part of software work - the design. I want them to automate deployment, release management, & all the boring sysadmin stuff. I don't wanna fiddle w/ k8s, get lost in yaml config, or munge terraform DSL. Automate ops & leave the fun part to humans 🙏

I'm slowly coming around to understanding the appeal of languages that promise - "if it builds, it works."

After this week's outburst, my inbox is flooded w/ msgs sales folks from o11y cos. o11y is hard, & I really don't think another tool on top of the existing zillions is gonna solve it. Otel is complex. We need some way to clamp on this tooling palooza - not just add to it. Also, Datadog is king 🤴

This entire grift relies on convincing people that they don't know how to do the things they have always known how to do, and ironically, if it works, we will, in a very short amount of time, forget how to do all the things we have always known how to do.

There is no denying that there's a pull towards promotion-driven development at many Big Tech companies. But if you think further: a lot of this not a bad thing for the company. It's how engineers + teams stay nimble, unafraid of building new stuff + migrating Which is critical

Maybe we should just give up and pay for datadog. OTEL doesn’t work and the LGTM stack even w/ a large enough o11y team produces kludgy solutions. 4 pages went off today b/c the otel metrics lib allocated like crazy and freaked out Go GC. Never had this w/ DD. Having my r/wsb moment now.

Expressiveness, syntactic sugar, & the freedom of writing the same thing in multiple ways in PLs cause so much woe. People focusing on those want to get paid for yak shaving work, which is kind of absurd. One thing I hope LLMs do to the PL syntax convo is what automated linters did to styling.

The world would be a much better place if lib authors (myself included) inside large companies actually used their own lib APIs before implementing them. Some timeless advice on authoring reusable code. abhinavg.net/2022/12/06/d...

Once you’re worth enough to not have to pretend that IKEA furniture isn’t fucking garbage you should get a “I Won Capitalism” medal and 99% taxes.

I’ll be speaking at the Berlin Go Meetup on December 3 @Wolt office. If you’re around that location and into Go, would ove to have you there 👏 www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Picked up a neat trick to test subprocesses while watching Mitchell Hashimoto's talk on Advanced Testing with Go. rednafi.com/go/test-subp... #golang #testing

This is also one of MY favorite things that’s ever happened on the internet!

I grumbled about something and a colleague sighed and said, "well that's why we get paid the medium bucks" and I think that's my new catchphrase.

AI grifters don’t get half the hate that Hacktoberfest novices do.

I've been running autonomous agents this whole time.

"Forward-deployed" & "solution" engineers sound like this era’s version of “industrialists” - no one knows what the words mean.

In response to a query on reddit, expanded a bit on the context package’s recommendation for avoiding key collisions. rednafi.com/go/avoid-con... #golang

Wisdoms, aphorisms, and pointed observations — fragments I find myself frequently quoting in conversations about software, philosophy, and ways of working. rednafi.com/lore/

There is not a single reason to outsource your creativity to a computer. Not one. To do so removes the very point of being creative in the first place.

One day the industry will recognize the drawbacks of AI agents and nondeterministic automation, and rediscover the UNIX philosophy of chaining together small purpose built tools in a low cost and predictable way, otherwise known as shell scripts.

There are multiple ways to group subtests in Go. But often enough, I see folks pulling in a third-party library just for that. With a bit of discipline, most of the time you can avoid 3p libs for this. Did a comparison between several ways of doing it. rednafi.com/go/subtest-g... #golang

The genie's outta bottle and there's no going back. On top of that, companies have started to impose insane deadlines & expecting people armed with AI will do it regardless. But at the end of the day, I resonate with John here so much. I don't want to maintain slop. thenewstack.io/go-experts-i...

The issue w/ LLM guided code is that, it works well in a very specific context. If you code in that ctx, your exp will be quite different from someone who doesn’t. While many are busy extolling how great LLMs have been, in a closed source corp setup, maintaining LLM slop has been a nightmare.