lukasschwab.me • blog

Fast Counterfactuals for Go Cache Hit Rates « blog 2026-10-02 Fast Counterfactuals for Go Cache Hit Rates The pièce de résistance in ‘Scaling Golang CI by Replacing actions/setup-go’ is the conclusion that 86% of actions/setup-go test package runs are pre…

Poisoning a Go Cache « blog 2026-09-23 Poisoning a Go Cache Earlier this month I explained Go’s caches in a post I coauthored for CloudX, ‘Scaling Golang CI by Replacing actions/setup-go.’

Quasi-cognitive Dimensions of Notations « blog 2026-07-20 Quasi-cognitive Dimensions of Notations Thanks to Ali for the encouragement.

Spain Bibliography « blog 2025-05-26 Spain Bibliography I spent two weeks in Spain and read these books along the way.

Gothic Micro-Architecture « blog 2025-03-19 Gothic Micro-Architecture I want to highlight an architecture paper I enjoyed: François Bucher’s “Micro-Architecture as the ‘Idea’ of Gothic Theory and Style,” published 1976.1 It’s short: just six pages, plus p…

Bring Your Own Linter « blog 2025-03-09 Bring Your Own Linter Write a custom linter: analysis Build a standalone linter; run it Customize golangci-lint Adapt your Analyzer Build the linter binary Custom golangci-lint in VS Code Custom golangci-lint in Git…

Deriving Safe ID Types in Go « blog 2025-02-01 Deriving Safe ID Types in Go Assumptions Defining a new string type Embedding uuid.UUID Defining a new uuid.UUID type Aliasing uuid.UUID Summary This is entirely my advice, but I realized it while contracting…

In Defense of New Boggle « blog 2025-01-18 In Defense of New Boggle They literally don’t make Boggle like they used to.

“Mystery Box” Economics « blog 2024-12-23 “Mystery Box” Economics Robinhood announced a new “Mystery Box” points redemption feature to Gold [credit] Card customers today.

Postmortems are for Reading « blog 2024-12-05 Postmortems are for Reading You probably have a folder of old technical incident writeups — that time you dropped an important database table, or accidentally disabled an error rate monitor, or sent every cust…

Applying the “Hierarchy of Controls” « blog 2024-12-03 Applying the “Hierarchy of Controls” One of the US Chemical Safety Board’s “Key Lessons” from the Atchison, Kansas accidental mixing incident is that the operator in question, and others like it, shou…

Safety Through Incompatibility « blog 2024-11-22 Safety Through Incompatibility October 21, 2016: a Harcros Chemicals delivery truck arrives at the MGPI Processing plant in Atchinson, Kansas for a routine early-morning delivery of sulfuric acid.

‘Magic’ in Elixir’s Logger « blog 2024-11-03 ‘Magic’ in Elixir’s Logger I first drafted this post in December 2022.

Applying “Laws” of Software Evolution « blog 2024-10-26 Applying “Laws” of Software Evolution Common models can be didactically useful even if they are, basically, not correct.

Paris Redux « blog 2024-02-19 Paris Redux I’m looking forward to visiting Paris again this spring.

Three-Step Lifted Interfaces « blog 2023-12-30 Three-Step Lifted Interfaces Look — I might just be a types person.

Four Translations of Todesfuge « blog 2023-06-10 Four Translations of Todesfuge German Art After 1960 at SFMOMA includes two huge Anselm Kiefer canvases, heavy oil paintings matted with straw.

Ceci n’est pas… « blog 2023-03-19 Ceci n’est pas… Marcel Broodthaers’s career as a visual artist begins where his career as a poet — in the traditional poems-on-paper sense — comes to an abrupt end: in 1964, in an oblong blob of plaster.

Easier OCR on macOS « blog 2023-02-18 Easier OCR on macOS Scanning a document digitizes an image of a printed page, but doesn’t digitize the text on that page: you can’t search for a keyword or copy a relevant passage into another document.

Comparing Vertex Cover Algorithms « blog 2022-10-30 Comparing Vertex Cover Algorithms Experiment space Vertex cover algorithms Topologies Weight schemes Project structure Simulations lavrov overview clever overview In “Graphs at Work” I claim To improve t…

Graphs at Work « blog 2022-09-03 Graphs at Work You might never invert a binary tree, but graph theory — and graph algorithms — worm their way into software engineering, whether you recognize them or not.

Technical Writing for Sequin « blog 2022-08-27 Technical Writing for Sequin I joined Sequin earlier this year.

Managing Emails from Recruiters « blog 2022-07-06 Managing Emails from Recruiters I have a GitHub profile, so I’m doomed to receive emails from tech recruiters until the end of time.

Tech Debt and Taxes « blog 2022-03-14 Tech Debt and Taxes In Reframing Tech Debt, Leemay Nassery suggests framing technical housekeeping positively — as building “tech wealth” — to convince business and product stakeholders it’s worthwhile.

Collected Memories of Evans Hall « blog 2022-02-13 Collected Memories of Evans Hall Berkeley’s Evans Hall is unmitigatably ugly, inside and out, even at a great distance; to the discerning student, Evans is the ugliest structure on campus.

Hearst Hall: Continued Reading « blog 2021-07-04 Hearst Hall: Continued Reading Style and Structure Adaptation Loss as final adaptation Losing Hearst Hall Modernism Wurster Hall On sources Writing typically hurries one of my interests out of its “all-cons…

Genres and Subtraction Tests « blog 2021-06-13 Genres and Subtraction Tests The Subtraction Test isn’t a mental model in itself, but it relates to one: genre.

Blogging with TikZ « blog 2021-05-21 Blogging with TikZ Programming Langauges and Compilers (CS 164) with Paul Hilfinger was the hardest class I took in college, bar none.

State Machines via Jorge Luis Borges « blog 2021-02-19 State Machines via Jorge Luis Borges This post is, first and foremost, an introduction to state machines (also called “automata”) via an extended Borgean allegory about an existence in a labyrinth, a…

Making Things Worse on Purpose « blog 2021-02-13 Making Things Worse on Purpose Lately I’ve enjoyed breaking bad habits and resolving little frictions in my life by tweaking apps that cause and enable them. news-feed-eradicator specifically eliminates Fac…

Hearst Hall « blog 2020-11-22 Hearst Hall An urban college campus is an interesting place for architectural archaeology.

Web Syndication with JSON Feeds « blog 2020-11-02 Web Syndication with JSON Feeds Sometime in the last ten years, while you were mourning the loss of Google Reader, we entered the golden age of content syndication.

Processing PDFs with Cloud Functions « blog 2020-10-19 Processing PDFs with Cloud Functions Two months ago I found the trove of papers on Nancy Leveson’s MIT homepage1, which planted the seed of a thought.

Web App Product Ontologies « blog 2020-08-22 Web App Product Ontologies Web apps with user interfaces lend themselves to object-orientation.

Architecture and Organs « blog 2020-07-25 Architecture and Organs Last November, at the end of a long day of walking, I sat in Saint-Étienne-du-Mont and tried to sketch its rood loft.