Unity builds are great until you reach a critical size. Start modularizing earlier even if the modular build is slower than the unity build. At some point that stops being true and you're in a good spot.

You can post about semaphores, atomics, and syscalls on LinkedIn if you want.

add10(int *) versus add10 inlined. When you take a "pointer" from a local variable and "pass" it to a function, but the compiler knows the pointer is not a pointer but the register that contains the local variable.

When an LLM finally confesses it just “speculates based on general patterns” 😅

Ordered 32GB of DDR5 today. 💵 It’s been a long while since I bought RAM that is not the one soldered in a Macbook’s motherboard. Feels good and affordable.

The number of numbers in red circles I have throughout all software I use at work is maddening. Zoom is a big offender here trying to get me to read chats from all meetings.

Rust solved the problem of querying a map structure without necessarily allocating a key value. The key type can have a borrowed version that is equivalent to the owned version of the key.

“wE lAunChed our SaaS a mONth ago and alReady mADE it to 1M ARR”

Elon is bragging about X not being affected by the outage today and, unfortunately, his audience can’t appreciate that all the decisions that lead to this were taken by the team he laid-off when Twitter was acquired.

The idea seems very applicable to programming systems that offer a high-level API that is supposed to be implemented in terms of implementations that are specialized for different types for perf reasons (e.g. ML frameworks, dataframe libraries) dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

AI coding tools make us exploit all the shortcuts you can to ship more quickly at the cost of eventually making it unsustainable.

Inexperienced programmers are too quick to point out “skill issues” because they think the hardest challenge of software projects is the acquisition of skills. Experienced ones, understand that the chances of success of a project increase when the skill requirements are reduced.

If you don’t put some effort into memory management, generated code size, dyn traits and disabling inlining where it helps code layout, using Rust won’t make your system faster than the version written in a language with a GC and/or JIT.

Rust solved the problem of querying a map structure without necessarily allocating a key value. The key type can have a borrowed version that is equivalent to the owned version of the key.

I installed Termios on my iPhone and I can SSH to my MacBook (Tailscale FTW), run tmux, Neovim and Amp (AI coding agent CLI) from anywhere. 😌

This post is a must-read for anyone navigating the programming language design and engineering space. lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2025/05...

Very observant of Sam to notice the consequences of AI on the internet.

Thinking that deploying by dragging and dropping a bunch of files into a folder on the server is a "simple" operation is the most 2007 take to resurge in 2025.

Rust is easy to write and and as a consequence of that it's very easy to find Rust code that is very frustrating to read. fn foo(a: &T) { bar(a.clone()) } 😤

Yet people measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced". In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to "the number of tokens spent". — Dijkstra, 1983

I know the difference between - (hyphen), – (en dash), and — (em dash) but that doesn’t make me a robot.

Learned a new acryonym: WYSINWYX What You See Is Not What You eXecute

Today is the new semester for @db.cs.cmu.edu's Intro to Database Systems! We're going harder into material than before. More challenging projects but you can use LLMs to help. We also have 10min talks each Wed from leading DB companies: 15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2025

My take on DDD: Proper *Data* modeling wins over *Domain* modeling every time. Computers deal with data not real world objects. Start with the Relational Model as your guide for everything, deviate where it makes sense, but not by default.

What people are getting from these AI coding agents feels very close to what people that customized their editor to automate a bunch of tasks for years and years. It's not the time saved! But the good feelings that you get out of having agency over the source-code in a project.

Mastodon is very triggering to me, because my immediate reaction is "it can't work", followed by "maybe they know something I don't and I'm being an over-engineer". But no, it's actually impossible technically and socially.

`git fixup` is the missing git command I always needed. I will try `git conflicting` next time I see git rebase conflicts. github.com/dinsandra/gi...

We shouldn’t be teaching beginners that multi-dim C arrays are any good for representing matrices. Go straight to something like dlpack (simplified). github.com/dmlc/dlpack/...

LLMs are avid documentation readers and that creates a stronger incentive for documentation writing. And humans will benefit without having to read the docs because the agents will match prompt and docs to generate the code.

Learning to use git reflog prepared me for this Agentic AI era.

Happy user of `git add -p` for 13 years now.

Error values instead of exceptions is only superior if combined with a type system that enforces checking. What Go does is the worst of both worlds.

When AI coding tools have negative effects: it's the same phenomena that happens when candidates in job interviews can click a button to run the code. Stuck in a time-consuming loop. Forgetting that stopping and thinking before the next step can save more time.

Saying that someone complaining about the UX of LaTeX can't make a replacement for it, is like when people said C++ could never be replaced because the "complainers" simply didn't understand memory management. They did understand it so well that they could even encode the rules.

People concluding “this LLM is smarter” for the sole reason that answers to a small set of questions matches their biases, at this point, is beyond stupid. LLMs are a direct result of the training set, they aren’t, and don’t have to be consistent or even partially consistent like humans.

You either write relatively fast code by default or you end up with slow code. There is no "we will come back and optimize later if necessary". That will never happen. The code will simply remain slow.

Remember when you had to type `vector<pair<int, int> >` because the C++ lexer would recognize >> as the shift-right operator otherwise?

If you learn Rust you will be able to produce the same assembly or even better than what you can achieve with C++. But you have to communicate more details to the compiler. Things that would have to be in your mind to make sure the code was correct.

The world is depressing at the moment and politics being the central topic on Bluesky makes it also a bit depressing.

Make sure your API v2.0 isn’t much simpler and elegant because it doesn’t implement all the basic requirements fulfilled by v1.0.

Puns in Gothenburg 🇸🇪

Idea: let's create giant stacks of complexity so that services continually change their internal IPs for no reason. And then we'll say our problems are DNS

A framework you can use to save time during interviews Make sure you don’t skip these steps when solving a problem: 1. Understand it 2. Plan the whole solution 3. Execute 4. Check

Rust’s lack of function overloading means I can edit a callsite and still jump-to-definition reliably. In C++, if f() is overloaded and you: -f() +f(true) Jumping to f is now broken unless f(bool) is defined.

The C preprocessor being terrible forces you to learn C++ meta-programming and only use macros as a last resort. Rust macro system is better, so newcomers reach to macros more frequently than they probably should.

Disabling shadowing creates more problems than it solves.

Uncle Bob criticism of what Agile has become boils down to blaming programmers for losing the power they once had. A total disconnect from how power structures within tech companies and the market at large have evolved.

This Standard SQL you speak of... is it here with us now?

VS Code was slowing down my system because it crashed and didn't cleanup all the crazy processes that it starts. I don't use it as an editor. I installed to test something and this was the experience. Bad luck?