As someone who, while growing up, had measles, rubella, and many other horrible illnesses now preventable by vaccination, I simply cannot fathom why people want to revert to that time. I spent a lot of time in bed or at the hospital as a child. Yes, I survived, but not by much. Why go back there?

Finished Dan Brown’s latest thriller, The Secret of Secrets. Oh man, 700 pages of a roller coaster ride. This one ties with Inferno as my favorite book by the author. I also read it a few months after my visit to Prague, which made putting things into context much easier.

Any sufficiently advanced AI agent is indistinguishable from a rootkit.

I’ve always wondered why most enterprise code sucks compared to OSS code, despite having far more focused resources. Now I know why!

These how I slop posts are getting tiresome. Quit pretending there's any skill involved in slop munging.

Dependabot security alerts have terrible signal-to-noise ratio, especially for Go vulns. That hurts security! Just turn it off and set up a pair of scheduled GitHub Actions, one running govulncheck and the other running CI with the latest version of your deps. Less work, less risk, better results!

I wish that those surveys so often cited by InfoSec pundits that ask Do you fully trust AI output? Do you always verify AI output? also asked Do you fully trust your colleagues' output? Do you always verify your colleagues' output? Just to have comparative numbers, you know.

Working with Kotlin pretty extensively for the last two weeks. I find the the concurrency abstraction of Kotlin to be better than Go in some aspects. There are more to learn in terms of syntax but orchestrating coroutines is much less error prone in Kotlin. Also null safety is much appreciated.

"Your Go tests probably don't need a mocking library" by @rednafi.com I learned a ton from this post. Some of these patterns I intuitively used before and didn't know the name for such a pattern. Thanks for the write up Redowan Delowar. rednafi.com/go/mocking-l... #golang

The thing that brought me to #go was its firm stance on not trying to do everything. Over the 8 yrs of using the language, it’s been great to see that it hasn’t tried to mimic other ecosystems and lose its identity. It’s not perfect, but it’s damn close to being perfect for the things I do.

Now, people are signing "100% human generated, including the emdashes" under their AI generated drivels.

With Go 1.26, you can easily log to multiple targets (like stdout, a file, or a remote server) using just the standard library. All thanks to slog.MultiHandler, which sends log records to any number of handlers you configure.

As a non native English speaker, I find this ridiculous:

Wrote a bit about eschewing 3p mocking libs & making a mess out of your Go tests. Reddit picked it up and so far the commets have been civil 😅 rednafi.com/go/mocking-l...

This blog post is a cautionary tale of the disaster that is trying to scale PostgreSQL beyond its limits. I firmly expect to have someone cite it to me as an example of how PostgreSQL scales extremely well.

Making lots of new friends thanks to this starter pack. If you're a dev writer / video maker / devrel, I'd love to follow you! Hit me with a reply👋

The more I have AI agents write all my code, the more I feel that us devs will be alright (and possibly more in-demand for important stuff) Hard for me to imagine anyone building *reliable* software without an understanding of how to do this (either via experience or study)

People use LLMs to tackle insane deadlines, then try to triage the incidents that follow with LLMs too. During review period, feedbacks are generated with LLMs as well. Then managers summarizes them with AI. What’s the corporate equivalent of the Dead Internet Theory?

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