Husband and Wife https://xkcd.com/3237/ Borat came out twenty years ago this year--closer to the breakup of the Soviet Union than to today--but it honestly feels like it's been even longer, somehow. Explain xkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3237

So much of what I try to get out of AI is tedious shit I don’t want to do myself anymore: reorganising code, checking for outdated documentation, finishing a refactor, and now even more advanced stuff like explaining the costs in an aws account.

A day with Claude and I still can’t get the instrumentation part of OpenTelemetry working

Amazingly, it's not been a complete stretch to get ocgtk compiling and running an example on Windows, but it's a bit useless for now: we need the MSYS2 environment (Cygwin is recommended), but this means no ocamlfind (not available for MSYS + OCaml >= 5), ruling out using most packages in opam

Tailiwind with Node: here is tw, my port of Tailwind CSS v4 to OCaml! With a live demo of tailwind classes compilation running in the browser: gazagnaire.org/blog/2026-04...

And ocgtk is now on opam www.chrisarmstrong.dev/posts/ocgtk-...

ctx.ist has me asking my LLM like a lunantic: "do you remember?"

If you have complaints about YAMLx, please direct them to me. #ocaml

Watched a tiny brushtail possum jump into a bush followed by a bat landing on the same scraping around for fruit on a windy night. Weird omen.

Up to my armpits in opentemetry things again, and facing down the fact that each vendor (*cough* Datadog *cough* AWS) introduces their own incompatible nonsense somewhere despite the fact they comply with the standard, making it hard to configure both without service degradation

I’ve already announced this on the forums, but for everyone else www.chrisarmstrong.dev/posts/introd...

OK if you want this cursed setup you can use WSL , you’re already in abusive relationship with your OS

Trying to get the opam github across to do unholy things with pkgconf on Windows in the vain hope it might compile ocgtk

I do like the Claude Remote Control feature but its still so unreliable. It seems to get stuck at least a couple of times a day such that l have to access the session directly and continue it (permissions prompts seem to be where it is most buggy)

I was so happy to have these when travelling in Japan, so I’m glad to see someone is making them in Australia too dipacci.com.au/products/sin...

Alas, not quite enough. There are a whole heap of symbols that don’t document when they were introduced. I think Rust’s bindings have this in their override files, so I might be able to use them for reference

I'm super close to finishing a Next.js-like experience for OCaml on top of Dream: file-system routing, server components, typed routes, and a CLI that hides most of the dune machinery with LSP, error overlay, hot reload, melange integration...

So I’ve put out a preview release of ocgtk (my Ocaml bindings for gtk4), but an opam release will take a fair bit more work 😭

I just got versioned API guards to work in ocgtk but it won’t build on macos in opam CI/CD still due to some excluded API parts 😭😭

I’ve learned how to make Tesco style pitas and now they’ve become currency within the extended family 🤦‍♂️

This milestone is done. Just need to cleanup the repo, write a roadmap, and cut a release

Sydney is going through that midautumn period where the weather is perfectly moderate (warm days cool nights) and there is just enough rain for the garden to look lush.

Destruction of art, destruction of meaning

I’m trying to create tests for ocgtk that load a Gtk UI and interacts with it, checking that actions and their results render. There doesn’t seem to be anything specific for this on the Linux desktop, but it appears I can get by somewhat with the ATSPI (accessibility API) that GNOME publishes.

Finally think I’ve got ocgtk into a state where I can iterate on small changes easily. I was able to enable constructor generation for classes which throw (I model their return as result types) with only a few lines, minimal duplication, and very little code searching (no LLM required)

Aliasing a module: only linked if referenced Aliasing a class: pulls in class runtime definition in all cases Aliasing a class type: zero cost

Back on my hobby horse (minimising code size in generated OCaml libraries)

I honestly don’t know how economists can carry on with a theory of value that prioritises subjective exchange value, when markets are pricing everything in terms of energy in light of the events of the past couple of weeks.

This is wrong: it turns out relying on structural typing to declare your classes makes some of them consume so much RAM when resolving and getting stuck they eat up so your RAM. The solution was just separate class types and remove the structural typing.

I managed to completely lock up my computer several times with an ocaml build (i9 with 12 cores and 32gb RAM) 🤦‍♂️

Oh no

At an Elden Ring “symphonic performance” and I’m thinking about that final scene in Tàr

Why am I not surprised the fandom of this show can be so deranged? It’s not queer, just a vehicle for BL fantasy, which needs to excavate anything meaningfully queer that would threaten that. www.starobserver.com.au/artsentertai...

Arrggh trying to get opencode to read skills from a custom path

The thing with this approach is you can create really complex tooling that adds little. I’m creating tools from scratch to make sure I really understand how it works and improves things, so you can strip it right back to just what you need for maximum efficiency (wasting tokens just slows you down).

I read an article like this, and it really resonates. I’m picking up bits from levels 1-7, but still finding myself trying to master 4-7 at the same time. www.bassimeledath.com/blog/levels-...

I have been a bit quiet on the ocaml front, but have been working on a private project using miou vif for a website/cms/newsletter/events management thing (are there any robur coop peeps on here?) thats quietly coming along

I'm open to new opportunities at the moment. Founding engineer at a fast-growing finance-based startup and working in startups/scale-ups over the past 10 years. Specialties are DevOps, cloud architecture & observability in product-driven environments. Node/Typescript/AWS/React, also OCaml.

me using Claude to investigate a nasty memory leak

If coding is your favorite part of software engineering, keep coding. AI doesn't stop you. But if coding was the only part you were good at, that's a different conversation. The job was always bigger than the code. #bransoncognac blog.bryanl.dev/posts/ai-sen...

Made bagels today 🥯 🤤

Soon to be MIT/Linux, because they’ll be vibe porting the GNU toolchain to Rust and it won’t be having a FSF-prescribed license

Discovered only through conversation at a meetup last night that a mutual friend was an Elixir developer in a previous life - apparently there was a small number of Elixir shops in Australia some time back.

Overproofing the sourdough nowadays. My starter is a mutant beast but it only like the good stuff

My slides (and my video, soon to be linked) from last night are here: www.chrisarmstrong.dev/posts/sydney...

Experimenting with frontier models again because M2.5 can’t follow instructions and misses so many things, as well as being hideously slow. Sonnet (at 10x the price) does so much better, but trying Kimi K2.5 and GLM again in the hope we can find a better medium

I'm speaking at Sydney AI Engineering meetup tomorrow (Weds) night on using niche languages and frontier models with AI coding tools www.meetup.com/sydney-ai-en...

Very excited to see ocaml 5.5 in alpha - relocatable Ocaml fixes so many workflows

Iterating on coding guidelines for OCaml that prevent an LLM from horrible nested blobs of match statements.