Gavin Ray Blog

As LLMs write more code, contracts and effect systems become essential tools for constraining behavior, exposing side effects, and verifying implementations.

I spent ages 14-16 in a maximum-security juvenile prison, became a felon at 19, lost almost everything to addiction, and later rebuilt my life through software, open source, and a few people who took a chance on me.

The next data platform may be less about storing data and more about deciding what AI agents should know, trust, and act on.

Using Linux's memfd_create(2) syscall to load shared libraries and execute binaries entirely from memory, bypassing noexec restrictions without ever touching disk.

LLMs have made generating code nearly free, but maintaining it hasn't changed.

Integrating a third-party LLM SDK does not make you an AI Engineer: a rant on the inflation of job titles in the age of ChatGPT wrappers.

Hands-on guide to the upcoming SQL/PGQ graph syntax using a patched Postgres 18 beta.

Reflections and hard-won lessons from a decade exploring over 20 psychedelic compounds.

A discussion on techniques available to overcome semantic errors in syntax when generating dialect-specific SQL

A tutorial on how to use Java's new Record Patterns feature to write powerful, concise pattern matching code for usecases like AST transformations and rewrite-rules in compiler passes.

A dual-purpose tutorial to 1) Demonstrate how to implement the Simple Query Protocol, where Java is an implementation detail; 2) Show practical examples of most of the new features since JDK 17, including Records, Sealed Types, Pattern Matching for Switch,

Design-by-Contract's invariant attribute allows you to enforce important properties of systems and data structures, making it an incredibly useful tool for developers.

A reflection on the impact of language models like Github Copilot on the experience on authoring software and the role of the developer

In this post, we will explore how to build a high-performance database buffer pool in Zig using io_uring's new fixed-buffer mode.

An overview of how the Panama Foreign Memory API can be useful outside of foreign/native applications

A tutorial on building a Query Expression Language/AST in Kotlin and implementing SQL generation