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I see you're not using JavaScript (which is awesome!) on one of my pages that uses it to provide a better experience. If you see something not working right, please let me know. My site should work exactly the same without it apart from any exceptions noted here.

I use prism.min.js to do syntax highlighting. It clocks in at 23kb total in size. Since the majority of the writing I do involves coding, I personally find this to be a worthwhile trade off. If you choose to keep this disabled, rest assured, the code examples are still there, they just may have some extra whitespace and obviously no syntax highlighting.

I do no tracking at all and am a zealot about keeping my pages as small as possible. If you're reading a page of mine that transfers more than about 250kb over the wire (including my most gratuitous indulgence — fonts) I've messed up.

So, if you'd like to have a slightly richer experience, consider enabling javascript for my site and I promise your trust won't be misplaced.

Microblog

2022-08-27 00:00

#structure #microblog #blog

This page serves as a simple index of all my microblog posts. This list should be roughly equivalent to searching for the #microblog tag.

If you're looking for my longer #blog posts see 201610270000 Tech — Work — Ramblings.
Ideating

2024-05-02 14:50

#microblog

I almost said the non-word "ideating" seriously today. I'm sorry.
Engineering Multi-classing

2024-10-20 11:10

#microblog

There's a good analogy in there somewhere with engineering, product management, and people management as DnD multi-classing.
Hell yeah NASA

2024-04-23 21:20

#microblog #link

NASA engineers never fail to amaze as they get Voyager 1 sending data again from interstellar space.
Timeout Killer

2024-05-05 12:51

#link #microblog

Timeouts and Cancellations for Humans

Nice article on the difficulties of actually doing timeouts correctly. And an idea for a malicious endpoint that returns 1 byte every second or so for the same request to keep poorly coded timeouts from triggering.
1BRC in rust in depth

2024-08-25 09:20

#link #microblog

Just found a really awesome, super in-depth write-up of a high performance computing approach to the 1 billion row challenge using Rust. I'll probably try and tackle this myself sometime soon. I've been itching to get some experience with really hyper-optimized computing.
Masonry Layout CSS

2024-04-23 21:22

#link #microblog

Help us invent masonry layouts for css grid level 3

I remember getting this working in ~2013 with flexbox columns, but I had to do a complicated interleaving operation to make the sequence correct from left to right then top to bottom. Cool to see this happening finally.
Mobile Content Width

2024-05-05 14:58

#microblog

I’d argue that there’s a greater chance that a website on mobile will have the wrong max width than the right one. These content overflows change scrolling — normally a 1 dimensional action up and down – into a fiddly, annoying 2D action.

A small amount of overflow can be fine because a lot of devices allow you to use the "zoom out" gesture to "lock" the screen to the full width. But that doesn't always work, and if the full width is very wide, the actual content becomes unreadably small.

It’s not that hard to do this correctly!

Scribbling furiously on my todo list to check every page in my site for this error to not look like a hypocrite 😬
The Final Edition of Embedded Muse

2024-10-22 01:01

#link #microblog

After 27 years, The Embedded Muse, an awesome programming newsletter focused on embedded systems issued its 500th and final edition. Its editor Jack Ganssle recently retired and is winding the newsletter down as part of getting to full retirement. Fittingly, the final issue has some really nice reflections on industry, programming careers, and life.

It's always a little sad to see things like these wind down on the internet. In the age of the enshittification of the internet, I value places like The Embedded Muse, where real people publish real thoughts and insights for others to enjoy and learn from and that facilitate forming genuine human connections. Obviously, change is the only constant and Jack should take his well deserved retirement, but that doesn't mean I won't miss it.
Up too late

2022-08-27 03:11

#microblog

An acute awareness of the passage of time and the fleeting nature of life. A deep nostalgia for every day as it passes. The painful beauty that is the human experience. A visceral understanding of the love that transcends reality for the love of your life sleeping next to you and the other love of your life snuggled in her crib with her wubba, Barbara, lovey, and blanket. All the dreams that stack up and likely won’t happen, but being ok with that because of the profound happiness in the banality of a normal life with your family. All the lives you aren’t, weren’t, and won’t be. All the other lives that were, are, and will be that aren’t you. Sonder. But deep, still, calm peace in spite of it. Happiness.

A glimpse into deep time, seeing the future of who I am and who my family is and how we’ve built and lived our lives. Living in a future moment where they’re grown.
Go is not worth it

2024-08-22 09:39

#microblog

I had to spend a lot of time recently — yet again — debugging weird edge case Go code in production. The person who wrote it had no idea how far off they were from writing something that behaved reliably and correctly. But they're also one of the people who I constantly hear proclaiming how easy it is to use Go, how simple it is, and how productive they are with it. To be fair, they're very productive at churning out bugs. But I'm tired of being on call for it.

This experience triggered me so hard, I almost wrote a whole blog post about how bad Go is. It constantly papers over real world complexity, has a whole arsenal of guns to shoot yourself with, and the people who don't realize that are the ones who love it and make my on-call shifts hell.

I hear the same arguments over and over about "simplicity" in the language that just don't hold up. I really don't understand if I'm just an absolute idiot or if there are loads of developers who don't realize that they're writing half-assed, buggy Go code while thinking it's "so easy and simple".

But honestly, I just couldn’t be bothered to write it all out. I'll never get through to those people. They'll have to learn it for themselves.

Continue reading
Tech — Work — Ramblings

2016-10-27 00:00

#structure #microblog #tech #ramblings #work #blog

This page serves as a simple index of all my blog posts. This list should be roughly equivalent to searching for the #blog tag.

If you're looking for my shorter #microblog posts, see 202208270000 Microblog.
Continue reading

Microblog

Ideating

Engineering Multi-classing

Hell yeah NASA

Timeout Killer

1BRC in rust in depth

Masonry Layout CSS

Mobile Content Width

The Final Edition of Embedded Muse

Up too late

Go is not worth it

Tech — Work — Ramblings