David Crawshaw

The agent principal-agent problem 2026-05-07 Code review is broken.

I am building a cloud 2026-04-22 Today is fundraising announcement day.

Eight more months of agents 2026-02-08 I wrote up my experiences programming with LLMs a bit over a year ago, and updated it for the world of agents eight months ago.

How I program with Agents 2025-06-08 This is the second part of my ongoing self-education in how to adapt my programming experience to a world with computers that talk.

How I program with LLMs 2025-01-06 This document is a summary of my personal experiences using generative models while programming over the past year.

jsonfile: a quick hack for tinkering 2024-02-06 The year is 2024.

new year, same plan 2022-12-31 Some months ago, the bill from GCE for hosting this blog jumped from nearly nothing to far too much for what it is, so I moved provider and needed to write a blog post to test it all.

log4j: between a rock and a hard place 2021-12-11 There is more than enough written on the mechanics of and mitigations for the recent severe RCE in log4j.

Software I’m thankful for 2021-11-25 A few of the things that come to mind, this thanksgiving. open/read/write/close Most Unix-ish APIs, from files to sockets are a bit of a mess today.

Remembering the LAN 2020-01-28 A memory and a dream.

The asymmetry of Internet identity 2019-09-29 Identity on the internet is messy.

Zero Trust Networks 2019-09-10 I am leery of jargon.

Go 1.13: xerrors 2019-04-28 Part of the Go 2 series of language changes is a new error inspection proposal.

Fast compilers for fast programs 2019-04-14 Compiler authors face a tradeoff between compiler speed and executable speed.

UTF-7: a ghost from the time before UTF-8 2018-10-31 On Halloween this year I learned two scary things.

One process programming notes (with Go and SQLite) 2018 July 30 Blog-ified version of a talk I gave at Go Northwest.

Reasoning with Regret 2018-07-16 I avoid looking to biographies for advice, most of all for anyone in the business world who is focused on spinning an origin story.

Searching the Creative Internet I had of late been lamenting the loss of the internet of the 1990s.

Service Throughput Tradeoffs 2018-04-13, David Crawshaw I am currently writing a service that lets users upload files.

Sharp-Edged Finalizers in Go 2018-04-05, David Crawshaw For background, see my last post on why in general finalizers do not work.

The Tragedy of Finalizers 2018-04-04, David Crawshaw Like many garbage collected languages, Go lets you register a finalizer on an object.

Go and SQLite: when database/sql chafes 2018-04-02, David Crawshaw The Go standard library includes database/sql, a generic SQL interface.

Experimentation Adrift 2018-03-30 You can learn numerous lessons from failure, almost all of them bogus.

Leaving Google 2018-03-27 Today is my last day at Google.

One spare afternoon a few months ago I read through the cgo calling code in the Go runtime.

The linked paper describes a new TCP congestion control algorithm.

A tiny C program that compiles to a 16GB executable.

"HEISENBERG: Well that's not quite right.

"No one else would follow; even the minister failed to show.

A post I wrote over on the Go blog. blog.golang.org/go1.7-binary-size

"Bill and I were actually talking about what kind of investments GV was looking to make.

"The irresistible proliferation of graphomania shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout: we are all writers!

"moving the font engine out of the kernel in Windows (which Microsoft has done starting with Windows 10)."

Rick and Austin just published their design doc for their new Go garbage collector.

"The average width of such a channel is 0.002 inch.

In 2012 Dean et al. published a paper on unsupervised learning using 16000 CPU cores.

As part of my work on reducing Go binary size, I ran into the concept of linker copy relocations.

I've attempted to add an atom feed to this page.

Los Alamos, the early 1940s.

"Unless you’re a plow driver or a parka-clad elected official trying to look essential, one doesn’t pretend to do battle against a blizzard.

SQL as a stream processing language.

An easy read that should be given to freshmen.

While I hear a lot more talk about the Raspberry Pi and Arduino, these BeagleBoard products are what I want to use for any embedded or small hardware development (in my case, a custom scientific instrument).

Over the holidays I took some real vacation and finally got stuck back into my hobby project.

A chart showing what interplanetary probe science missions will be active over the next few years.www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/12311322-planetary-exploration-timelines.html

C typedefs can have side effects: typedef int (*WTF[1])[x = x * 77]; twitter.com/whitequark/status/683692712374190081

"As if this were somehow a morally inferior form of megadeath to lobbing a couple thousand half megaton nuclear missile warheads at your least favorite country.

There is a rather unfortunate essay going around the tech crowd titled "The Refragmentation" , describing concepts of nationalism and conformity in the US as centering around the Second World War.

"It’s a Cortex M4F MCU with extraordinarily-low current consumption.

"One of Heraclitus’ best lines turns on a pun.