Blog Posts

A short post on one of the most useful techniques in distributed systems

When no one reads the code, Naur would say said project is dead. And yet businesses are building their future on dead code.

A post in which we explore adding a type system to a stack-based language as an exercise in verification.

This post introduces the langcontinuation framework, that allows for writing the code for both live and batch processing just once.

My coding agent, sid has a compaction strategy I’ve not seen in use elsewhere; I call it, “Ask an Expert!”

A brief link to a free book about my struggles with schizophrenia.

In my book Rusty Engineering Management I meander to a point I make explicitly here: There is a type system for engineering management and all you need to understand it is Rust.

I did something a bit crazy and made a lisp interpreter for error handling.

In which I argue that left-associative languages might be better for LLMs than other languages.

This post compares policyai’s benchmark on Sonnet 4.5 compared to the new Haiku 4.5 model.

An article in which I lay it all out and ask the world for help.

Vibe coding makes software expendable in a Hollywood way.

Your system prompt WILL leak. What are you going to do about it?

Large Language Models have internalized HTTP. Maybe all we need to give agents agency is a simpler HTTP protocol.

I make a prediction about the consequences of vibe coding.

The first quarter of my upcoming book in which I articulate how I think about building systems.

In which we draw comparisons between the Tao Te Ching and senior engineering leadership.

Humanity hates intelligence. What will happen to ASI?

In this article I begin to explore what matters to agents in 2025.

An ocean is the perfect metaphor to understand systems infrastructure.

A short conjecture about the end of consumption.

ProtoQL is an emerging open-source project aiming to provide a novel way to manage structured data using protocol buffers within a key-value store environment. It seeks to combine the strengths of both worlds, offering the schema definition and data serialization advantages of protocol buffers with the scalability and performance benefits of key-value stores.

guacamole provides a linearly-seekable random number generator.

A thought exercise for turning off racing thoughts.

sig-fig histogram provides an exponentially-distributed histogram with bounded error.

Setsum and mani can be combined together to track the setsum for a rich data structure.

mani provides a text-based write-ahead log.

setsum provides a checksum that operates on unordered sets of byte strings.

Triangular compaction is a new compaction algorithm debuting in lsmtk.

A summary of what I’ve been working on to try and get back to functional.

prototk is a protocol buffers library for Rust.