Raphael Poss · workbench

Where I recall the evolution of my tooling over the last few years.

A guide for newcomers to software engineering, and for anyone curious about how LLMs are changing it.

This post explains how I developed Community Maps, a small web app that helps members of a community share their approximate location with each other.

Introduction One of my favorites experiences of trimming unfruitful work directions thanks to theoretical results happened when I discovered this 2001 article from Jeroen Voeten: On the fundamental limitations of transformational design.

Introduction It occurred to me that the combination of human operator + AI programming agents forms a system that, if you squint, looks like a computing system.

This article investigates Message Layer Security (MLS), the IETF standard protocol (RFC 9420) for Signal-style end-to-end encryption.

Markets work when buyers are well informed.

This post introduces timecond, a TypeScript library I created to represent, evaluate, and describe complex conditions on time ranges.

The elephant in the room, anno 2024, is that all meaningful interactions currently happen in group chats.

This post explores unusual primitive constructs in programming languages, from data-like primitives to somewhat esoteric features.

Once upon a time, I spent multiple months implementing a graphing calculator using GW-BASIC (manual).

I published an article on the Cockroach Labs Blog: Contextual suggestions for SQL syntax.

I published an article on the Cockroach Labs Blog: Bubbles and sparkles: refreshing our SQL shell.

Let us start this year with the following: Manager’s club - Mega list of 1 on 1 Meeting Questions Superficially, this list (which can also be downloaded in a structured format here) compiles questions that can be asked during periodic meetings between a m…

Abstract In the Bubbline project we are trying to build readline-like semantics on top of Charm’s Bubbletea.

What makes an engineering manager want to improve their people management behaviors & skills?

You’re arriving here because you’ve been nominated for a Technical Leadership (TL) role in some team.

It’s this time of the year again!

In 2020, I published the following two articles: Data flows and security architecture in CockroachDB Authentication configuration in PostgreSQL and CockroachDB The original text was targeting version v20.1 of CockroachDB.

There are more-or-less “hidden” rules on how to actively progress one’s career in a large-ish corporation.

After reaching a certain level of seniority, it’s expected that a worker can self-direct in service of the organizational goals.

Say, you’re tasked with onboarding a new teammate, a new co-worker.

This document describes why and how a tech company can offer a career path to its engineering technical leaders, that is, different tracks for “deep ICs” versus “broad ICs”.

Ever since 2010, I have studied the “meta” of software, by studying (and thinking about) the continued dialogue between programming language designers, computer designers, and programmers.

On September 28, 2021, Melissa Amaya and Jon Purnell from the Data & Dev podcast interviewed me and Aaron Blum, lead engineer of the security team at Cockroach Labs.

On September 28, 2021, Melissa Amaya and Jon Purnell from the Data & Dev podcast interviewed me and Aaron Blum, lead engineer of the security team at Cockroach Labs.

Note The latest version of this document can be found online at https://dr-knz.net/go-executable-size-visualization-with-d3-2021.html.

I published an article on the Cockroach Labs Blog: Log and error redaction in CockroachDB v20.2.

Note The latest version of this document can be found online at https://dr-knz.net/go-errors-vs-exceptions-2020.html.

Note The latest version of this document can be found online at https://dr-knz.net/go-calling-convention-x86-64-2020.html.

The idiomatic way to propagate errors in Go is using the predefined type error.

Go 1.13’s standard library has adopted Dave Cheney‘s main contribution to error handling from 2015: the idea that Go error objects are structured as linked lists.

This writeup is part of the prologue to a series of articles that talk about the “CockroachDB errors library”, which is really a general-purpose, open source replacement for Go’s standard errors package.

This writeup is part of the prologue to a series of articles that talk about the “CockroachDB errors library”, which is really a general-purpose, open source replacement for Go’s standard errors package.

This article explains how I stopped a software vendor and at least one of its customers from hemorraging $50K+ yearly due to unnecessary costs. ❦❦❦ A recommended best practice in Enterprise security is the “three R’s”: Repair, Repave and Rotate [1] [2] [3…

Hillel proposed on Twitter today: “Expressiveness” is how easily we can ‘do’ things in a system.

I published an article on the Cockroach Labs Blog: Nested transactions in CockroachDB 20.1.

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS uses Snap to distribute certain packages by default, including Chromium.

What is faster: a local connection over a unix domain socket, or a local TCP/IP connection with TLS encryption?

Both PostgreSQL and CockroachDB provide a little-known gem when it comes to controlling incoming SQL connections: a flexible, versatile configuration DSL for client authentication.

This blog post provides an overview of the data flows inside CockroachDB and its data security architecture.

I like to think about computer security as the science of how things can go wrong with computers.

Using Emacs and advanced Emacs customization for editing Go.

“My partner is moving for their job,” “I would like to move out of the city” or “I need to spend some time caring for my relatives,” so would the conversation often start.

This week, I collaborated with my friend Martin at Daiteq to add a feature to the UT-LEON3 processor and support it in our variant of the C language called SL.

Specifically, I shifted my use of Slack to become a low-volume, two-times-a-day, asynchronous, opt-in communication medium in my workflow.

Note The latest version of this document can be found online at https://dr-knz.net/go-executable-size-visualization-with-d3.html.

SQL defines many statements for different things: creating tables, putting data into tables, using tables, between other things.

Upon our arrival in New Orleans on November 5th, 2018, my friend Nathan explained to me, with a mix of apparent excitement and apprehension: “our internal Jepsen test suite found a real consistency bug.”

Note The latest version of this document can be found online at https://dr-knz.net/measuring-errors-vs-exceptions-in-go-and-cpp.html.