A Go question: how do you test <code>select</code> based code?
Summary of reading: October - December 2025
"The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution" by Francis Fukuyama - while reading this book it occurred to me that domains of study like political sciense must be incredibly difficult and frustrating. Imagine trying to match a model ont...
The SSA Phase
In the previous post , we explored the IR—the compiler’s working format where devirtualization, inlining, and escape analysis happen. The IR optimizes your code at a high level, making smart decisions about which functions to inline and where values should live—on the h...
Books I Read in 2025
Books I read in 2025, in no particular order. In the past I used the e-ink readers, but in the last few years I prefer to read and collect the physical books. This is not that expensive if you buy second hand books. This year I found a great service called bookbot.de where you ca...
That mockingbird won't sing: a mock API server in Rust
Faking it till you make it isn’t always the best strategy in life, but it can be a useful one in software engineering. Here’s an easy way to create a local HTTP server for testing Rust API clients.
How to Know If your Software Is Overcomplicated or Oversimplified?
Quick takeaways Complexity comes from two extremes - projects fail both when they’re overcomplicated with unnecessary patterns and when they’re oversimplified for a complex domain Essential vs accidental complexity - essential complexity comes from the domain itself...
Shooting myself in the foot with Git by accident
Plugins case study: mdBook preprocessors
mdBook is a tool for easily creating books out of Markdown files. It's very popular in the Rust ecosystem, where it's used (among other things) to publish the official Rust book. mdBook has a simple yet effective plugin mechanism that can be used to modify the book output in arbi...
Pop quiz: what time was it?
Here’s a small quiz derived from some incorrect advice from an AI coding assistant. This program prints two timestamps; will they be a. Roughly the same time (ie, the same second)b. Roughly 10 seconds apartc. Something else Answer after the fold
What an error log level should mean (a system administrator's view)