Reflecting on 2025, and FUN OCaml stands as one of my proudest achievements. From a simple idea to a thriving community where OCaml developers connect, learn, and hack together. 🧡🐫 What started in Berlin 2024 continued in Warsaw, proving this community has real momentum.

Now that I know what this is, I’m realising this could just have been an effect in a real programming language instead of a whole language runtime thing with special sauce 😫 dev.to/aws/aws-lamb...

The sheer ignorance of people who think they can buy their way out of society and live in an independent micro state….with *money*…is <chefs kiss>

Hot off the blog press: Standards Queues Definitely the hardest part right now, imho. bkardell.com/blog/Queues....

my own little musing on software developers and how we build our own tools www.chrisarmstrong.dev/posts/we-bui...

If you didn't get the chance to see my talk at ICFP back in October on smaws, or don't like watching videos, the PDF version detailing each aspect of my talk has finally been published: conf.researchr.org/details/icfp...

In Sydney’s east and the ibises look…healthy. Not the decrepit trash monsters you find in the inner west

Doing object polymorphism in OCaml with standard classes and objects and polymorphic variants at the same time. Getting surprisingly lucid options from an LLM to work out how to implement it sanely

It’s genuinely been interesting working through a port of lablgtk from gtk 3 to gtk 4 bindings with Claude Code and Codex. The process has been messy, especially given that most of it has been done on my phone, and hence relatively hands off.

Wondering if we could be building cross-compilers with examples like this to make it easier to validate forks for more niche architectures?

Lenovo have decided that calling me with a phone number from a remote west Australian town is the best way to sell me hardware

Translation: I came, I saw, I funded

I cannot imagine having such an abusive relationship with my operating system that I need to do any of this arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025...

okay so i'm having to make the claude code web thingie install opam and create a switch because it ocaml is not one of the "popular" languages it decided to include packages for

the gospel ecosystem has experimental tools for specification-driven testing, while editor support got better with OCaml-LSP 1.24.0 and Merlin 5.6. plus there's a new neovim plugin for ocaml devs! 🐫

I think AWS Lake Formation will break me

It’s still alive?! 🥳

I've become the sort of AI doomer that recognises that yes, it has some utility, it can make me productive in some scenarios, so I may as well use it as much as I can while the bubble is still inflating and it's still cheap

Why you should instrument your build pipelines www.chrisarmstrong.dev/posts/instru...

LLMs love to manipulate text, which means they absolutely love to use command line utilities and write scripts that manipulate text. My best advice would be: stop them before they can harm themselves and you.

a little LLM hack that may or may not work: More recent models have (most surely) been trained on data that describes how to prompt AIs themselves. You can tidy up a process that needs to be repeatable with the AI by simply just asking it to improve the prompt for itself.

What was supposed to be a quick article on build system observability looks like becoming a small series 🤦‍♂️

I had to stop myself from building a result type in typescript to solve a problem being unable to map over failed computations in only one module 😫

<sigh>...but is it disco?

ICFP wrap-up from me www.chrisarmstrong.dev/posts/icfp-w...

Now to chill in my hotel, sightsee some of Singapore, and get back to Sydney (why do all the flights have to be banked for an overnight return?)

I'm pretty much wrapped up for ICFP now - it was absolutely lovely meeting people from all over the world who work with or hack on OCaml, thank you to all those who made me feel welcome 😀

🛫 Sydney 🛬Singapore on my way to ICFP 😊

I swear the things AWS manages to squeeze out of their data centers should be classified as black magic. You can now create instant copies of EBS volumes with single-digit millisecond latency. Sounds simple - but this is an amazing feat of engineering. aws-news.com/article/2025...

I still think about when New Relic wrote a blog arguing that customers should leave vendors acquired by private equity (PE) b/c prices will go up+quality will go down. It was a stab at Sumo Logic just bought by PE. 6 months later New Relic got bought by PE...and deleted the blog

When working on a demo for smaws, one thing I noticed is how much tls negotiation affects the performance of lambda functions, independently of the programming language

✅ Speaker notes written ✅ Sample pulled together ✅ Demo prerecorded Now just to memorise it all (nobody warned me conference presentations are sooo involved)

In one of those lethargic and morose moods that has me drinking French 75s

software devs 996ing with the AI, telling themselves they just need to get better at context engineering

Using gemini code (for reasons) and the randomised loading descriptors are even more unhinged

great post! — ostensibly "why blog?" but also "how to reconcile writing across your entangled subselves?" and "to what extent exactly can you really own your identity and data online?" > Microposting feels like a race I’m always going to lose. Long-form writing is a nice long walk when I have time.

Another update on smaws development, this time a couple of days early for the month 😄 www.chrisarmstrong.dev/posts/smaws-...

Australian magpies have a bizarre mix of vocalisations when they think they're not being watched. A weird mix of their own calls, other birds and sounds I can't place.

found another exception for www.chrisarmstrong.dev/posts/removi... If you alias a module behind an interface, it will be pulled in regardless of whether it is used. i.e. module MyModule : Interface = MyModule_Impl will be pulled in but module MyModule= MyModule_Impl will not!

I’m honoured to be speaking at ICFP OCaml workshop in Singapore this October about smaws, an AWS SDK generator for OCaml. Looking to meet some more people from the OCaml community in person! conf.researchr.org/details/icfp...

An update on smaws, an OCaml side project of mine www.chrisarmstrong.dev/posts/smaws-...

My garden smells so sweet from all the citrus blossoms

It's still in the drafting/development stage (no mobile support), but @grm has been working hard on the YOCaml website to finally come up with a decent tutorial explaining how to use YOCaml, the static site generator in #ocaml step by step. yocaml.github.io/tutorial/ Stay Tuned!

Now I’m fighting dune, trying to use ppxes with the (mode promote) construct, and failing miserably 😭

I think this might save me a heap of horrible refactoring 🤞 ocaml.org/manual/5.3/f...

I'm in the process of trying to ensure smaws has some kind of compliance testing against the smithy specification. Thankfully AWS supplies protocol tests I can use to validate my implementation. These supply a "specification" from which I can generate test code to run against my implementation

This was a total fucking disaster

I swear Australians are so fond of queuing that I could stand randomly in front of something and people would form a line behind me

Just saw a wall fitting with the Telecom logo - what an antique!