Writing can happen from the position of expertise, but much of what is written has started from a decision to write, with research, gathering knowledge and building experience following.

Solving hard problems is very often about breaking them down into even smaller pieces, rather than about jumping multiple steps ahead.

There’re drawbacks to staying on top of things. Namely you don’t go deep.

> Prove X. Me: To prove X we need to demonstrate A and B. A is trivially true. B is true by construction. Hence we’ve proven X.

According to the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey[1], C is still more widely used than Go and Rust, despite being less appreciated. The lead of C for learning to program is even more significant, which is encouraging. 1. survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technol...

It's surprisingly convenient to be able to lookup the standard library function and header documentation via man pages. Now I want it for other languages.

Reading The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie from 1988, it's fascinating that all code examples still work in 2025 - 37 years later - with just -ansi compiler flag (-std=c90).

Best rust troll to date github.com/jedisct1/yes...

If you need a breather from all this bullshit, here's a photo of Earth. From Saturn. We're that slightly brighter star at centre right.

Another treasure trove of a talk by Bryan Cantrill on various aspects of software engineering from debugging data corruption to building successful engineering organizations. www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ0y...

tilvids.com/w/4MTECvQsBh... A short but sweet overview of the research of @grimalkina.bsky.social focusing on the environment conducive to (developer) success, but also highlighting important distinctions between performance and growth, and drawbacks of performance culture.

“Cloud” could have been instead called “server rental”. It’s common to see independent ideas such as SaaS and managed software to be conflated with the cloud.

I don’t want AGI. I want us to solve hunger, poverty, and cancer. I want renewable energy, fusion power, sustainable zero carbon economy which distributes value fairly, and supersonic travel. Thinking we can cheat and delegate these things to an AGI without putting in the effort is an illusion.

The Bear blogging platform looks really neat. I'm still too stubborn to give up a Git based workflow (Bear has no API for now). bearblog.dev

My recommendation for those at the start of their careers is to throw oneself in at the deep end. Ideally get into rocket science if you can. Alternatively, consider the options in the thread below. Dip your toes into all of them and pick a couple to go deep into.

I wonder if there's a way to side-step the design/accessibility trade-off on the web by allowing the user to opt in into certain accessibility features. A browser would then enrich/change/override how page elements are presented, at cost of some design inconsistency.

New arrivals for the home library 📚

It’s such a joy to flip through the pages of a printed magazine.

All share their successes, the better share their learnings, the best share their failures. And the pathetic share their shower thoughts passed off as high wisdom.

📝 Blogged: "What If We Could Rebuild Kafka From Scratch?" I did a little thought experiment: which characteristics and traits would be desirable if we were to start all over and develop a durable cloud-native event log from scratch? 👉 www.morling.dev/blog/what-if...

Working with Python on occasion always felt like a fight with the tooling. uv on the other hand just works as it's supposed to, and when it doesn't, it's usually my fault for not reading the docs more carefully.

So here in France we have a 5G-enabled electricity meter called Linky, which naturally here in the land where people who live in heaven think they live in hell there were all kinds of protests — Linky gives you cancer, makes your kids autistic, kills your dog, sets your house on fire, and so on.

Focusing solely on a career is like trying to squeeze as much juice as possible out of a lemon you have. Focusing on learning is like growing a lemon tree.

Wow, that's an insanely cool website: animejs.com/

The Dark Side Of Usability usabilitypost.com/2011/01/10/d... Some food for thought. The post is almost a decade and a half old but more relevant than ever.

After spending some time tweaking, I finally feel quite happy with macOS window management. btw, if you switch Caps Lock with Control, everything becomes instantly better in life, including the shortcuts below in the thread.

Good article with personal observations on the long term effects of using AI tools for programming. Some quotes in the thread. lucianonooijen.com/blog/why-i-s...

Humans of the Data Sphere by Jack Vanlightly (@vanlightly.bsky.social) is an excellent way to stay up to date with the field of distributed data systems and discover interesting people to follow. www.hotds.dev

Please include the year in your next paper. Thank you.

Ghostty is a joy to use! My favorite features so far are the window centered on start-up and the zero configuration philosophy. These 4 lines replace almost all of my WezTerm config, except for dynamically patching tmux config to update the theme on system appearance changes. #ghostty

Usually you bring the data to the code or the code to the data. With @duckdb.org you bring 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑎𝑡𝑎𝑏𝑎𝑠𝑒 to the code.

The visualizations are amazing!

One of the revelations since starting to use writing as a learning tool was how many concepts I thought I understood but actually didn't. Writing things down is a great way to crystallize ideas.

Writing about distributed systems one can observe that there’s at least one term for each fundamental concept :)

materializedview.io/p/cloud-stor... I wonder if the cloud storage triad speaks to some fundamental properties of a data system built on top of object storage or is rather shaped by the widespread cloud pricing model.

Realized I’ve kept buying books in recent years, but neglected my reading habit. As the first step to fix that, all the books I intend to read mid-term are now collected in one place to serve as a reminder and make it easier to pick up the next book.

New favorite Claude prompt: "generate a ragebait article about poor kubernetes decisions with mostly bullet points. make it look like a review/lessons learned. no paragraphs"

All the videos are up at www.hytradboi.com/2025#program now.

It's never too late.

DuckDuckGo browser handles cookie pop-ups for you out of the box. I haven't been this excited about a feature in a while.

It's very useful to have an environment where the content of a live OLTP database could be queried safely without any interference with the production operations. Give it a try - take a snapshot and poke around - you'll certainly run into many curiosities and might find some skeletons in the closet.

Reading about virtual memory management now, it makes me smile to remember how I tried in vain to write a C program that would iterate through pointer addresses to see what's in RAM almost 15 years ago.

me explaining what i do to friends and family

Bruce Momjian’s talk “Databases in the AI Trenches” might just be enough to get me interested in exploring what’s under the hood of the hype. https://momjian.us/main/presentations/extended.html#trenches

It's reassuring to see that delightful user experience is still a thing in the age of AI. After using Claude for a few days, I've been positively surprised, not just by the UI but by a well-tuned LLM as well, which produces balanced responses in terms of level of detail and tone.

A few points I find interesting: - in 2022 a decision was made to abolish leap seconds by 2035, by allowing UTC to drift from the time as defined by Earth's rotation (UT1) - negative leap seconds, while established, were never actually used https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00850-x

The program is up and tickets are live at www.hytradboi.com/2025/#program. I'll keep updating this thread as the last 10 talks hit camera-ready.

There are many ideas in software engineering that sound very promising when considered in abstract that fail to deliver given real world complexity and scale: functional programming, event-driven architecture, async/await, microservices, monorepos, etc.

Using iCloud Private Relay by default across devices revealed how many web services degrade when a (genuine) user connects via a VPN. For many it's not a choice but a necessity. I hope that the sheer scale of the iCloud user base creates pressure for service providers to accept use of VPN as a norm.