"The root cause of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities was that processor architects were trying to build not just fast processors, but fast processors that expose the same abstract machine as a PDP-11." C Is Not a Low-level Language: spawn-queue.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

+1, really enjoyed this talk. Some incredible examples involving the "the sophisticated software at the very lowest layers of the stack".

I've been looking at patterns for specific "migration" and "compat" packages in the JS ecosystem. I know about: - react-router-dom-v5-compat - @ vue/compat - ember-compatibility-helpers - jQuery Migrate Any others I should look at? Bonus points if you've used them successfully.

Don't miss this! It's a joy, and it feels like a throwback in the best way possible (caring about UI details, remember that??)

What I'm doing now → dubroy.com/now/ Note: I have availability for consulting projects in 2026. If you know of something interesting, please get in touch!

TIL: HTTP Range requests → https://github.com/pdubr...

New blog post — Look for what's true → dubroy.com/blog/look-fo...

TIL: Tidy Data → https://github.com/pdubr...

For those who might not be aware — "OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman gave Trump’s super PAC a whopping $25 million" www.sfgate.com/tech/article... "US Army appoints Palantir, Meta, OpenAI execs as Lt. Colonels" thegrayzone.com/2025/06/18/p...

Still thinking about worker vs boss mentality about AI.

"I have been maintaining my site for over 30 years. It’s older than Wikipedia or Google. Most software doesn’t last that long, and I don’t expect sassc or esbuild to last as long as my web site. When I’m choosing tools I ask myself 'what happens when this software disappears?'"

New blog post: De-Googling → dubroy.com/blog/de-goog... …in which I tell you about some great services & companies that I'm very happy to have discovered.

Two talks on data-oriented design that I enjoyed this week: Data-Oriented Design and C++ by Mike Acton → www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0I... (End with an unfortunately lame quote, but otherwise great) Cpu Caches and Why You Care by Scott Meyers → www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDIk...

TIL: One-liners for downloading media → github.com/pdubroy/til/...

Lots of gems here. Definitely worth a read if you blog or would like to. (And I'll be following @thorstenball.com's advice in 2026: set a schedule.)

Finally have a self-hosted version of my personal Twitter archive, so I can really, truly delete everything over there. → dubroy.com/twitter It's actually a lot of fun going through these! And orders of magnitude faster and more pleasant than on the official site.

"Valgrind is in essence a virtual machine using just-in-time compilation techniques." Huh. I had no idea. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valgrind

TIL: Protomaps and PMTiles → github.com/pdubroy/til/...

So much good stuff here! And lots of it can be applied to many other areas: learning experiences, programming languages, etc. via @szymonkaliski.com

What I'm doing now → dubroy.com/now/

TIL: V8 Natives syntax → github.com/pdubroy/til/...

fun romp through the Chromium graphics stack from an @electronjs.org dev www.electronjs.org/blog/tech-ta...

We just sent out our last newsletter of the year, chock full of Wasm tidbits and captivating compiler content. Not signed up? You're missing out! Get on the list at sendfox.com/wasmgroundup

Just added an example to the Ohm repo of implementing something like Zed's SumTree. (aka "monoid-cached trees" if you want to sound clever) Full example here: github.com/ohmjs/ohm/bl...

A very readable doc about V8's new bytecode verifier. Readers of our book may notice the similarity to the Wasm security model — see this excerpt from the chapter "What makes WebAssembly safe?"

What defines a correct program? What education makes a good programmer? The answer depends on what culture of programming you subscribe to! This has been a long time in the making, but my open access book on the history of programming is available for pre-order! www.cambridge.org/core/books/c...

TIL: Monoid → github.com/pdubroy/til/...

This document radicalized me.

No tumblr lives rent-free in my head the way accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com does.

Periodic reminder — bunny.net is great! I pay them…*checks notes* $1/month for a better version of everything I used Cloudflare for.

TIL: Printing V8 bytecode → github.com/pdubroy/til/...

A lot of folks know me for one or two posts, and might not know I've created nine (9!) visual explanations of computer science topics, aimed at practitioners. If you're looking for things to read this Thanksgiving, I think you'll love them. Computer science is a lot of fun, when explained well. ❤️

Not often that I’m reading a CS paper and think, damn, now there’s a good diagram. These pretty good…love the ✂️s From ”The Ubiquitous Skip List: A Survey…” dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

I'm working on something that benefited from a sprinkle of PBT, and this was *very* useful — Choosing properties for property-based testing → fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/proper...

Definitely one of the cooler language playgrounds I've seen: pinky.cool.omg.lol

Excited to finally release the blog post that @marianoguerra.org has been working on for a while!

TIL: Branded types in TypeScript → github.com/pdubroy/til/...

"Some compiler-development experiences are long slogs where you write code for months without ever having a thing that produces an actual executable that you can run." "My First Fifteen Compilers" by Lindsey Kuper blog.sigplan.org/2019/07/09/m...

A new blog post — devlog: garbage collection is useful → dubroy.com/blog/garbage... Trying something new: quick, technical posts about things I'm working on. Let's see if it sticks.

In basically every TypeScript codebase I touch, I end up adding a `checkNotNull` function exactly like the one from the Kotlin stdlib. So useful! Surprisingly I haven't seen many TS resources which mention this specific pattern.

Somewhat surprising (to me) advice in Google's C++ style guide: "Try to avoid unsigned types (except for representing bitfields or modular arithmetic). Do not use an unsigned type merely to assert that a variable is non-negative." Example of a possible bug: abseil.io/tips/227 (via @wingolog.org)

A cool paper from OOPSLA '25 — An Empirical Evaluation of Property-Based Testing in Python → dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1... Some interesting findings: - "Each property-based test finds about 50x as many mutations as the average unit test" - "76% of mutations were found within the first 20 inputs"

Ever thought about writing #WebAssembly by hand? 🤔 Authors Patrick @dubroy.com and @marianoguerra.org think it's crucial for learning. They join #WasmAssembly host Thomas Steiner to discuss their ebook, "WebAssembly from the Ground Up" → goo.gle/3Ln67Pp

Did you know that Microsoft MakeCode (a Scratch-like coding environment) supports a variant of TypeScript called "Static TypeScript"? github.com/microsoft/px... Also described in a 2019 MPLR paper: www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...

jumpscared by my own research paper appearing halfway down this blog post

Periodic reminder (since I apparently don't talk about it enough) — If you are interested in a hands-on way to learn #wasm, check out the book that @marianoguerra.org and I wrote together!

Working on a diagram for an upcoming @wasmgroundup.com blog post.

A blog post from last year, which I never posted here — Bytecode VMs in surprising places → dubroy.com/blog/bytecod...

Looking forward to this tomorrow!

If you're interested in UI frameworks/architectures, @raphlinus.bsky.social's writings on the evolution of Xilem (Rust UI toolkit) are an incredible resource: github.com/linebender/x... Covers details basically all the modern paradigms/toolkits: React, SwiftUI, Flutter, Compose, ImGui, etc.