Richard Cocks

Classic Bugs: Progress bar noticeably slows down npm install #11283 Throwback to 2016, and one of my all-time favourite classic bugs that serves as a cautionary tale to us all.

Agentic Perfectionism - When “Good enough” is no longer good enough Coming up to a year into agentic development, I’ve overcome the initial awkwardness and challenges, but I’m finding increasingly there’s a new spectre haunting me: Perfectionism.

The things we lost For all the promises of the internet to keep information, parts of it just quietly disappear without trace.

How to lie with benchmarks Naive double-recursion A recent hacker news post1 alerted me to the idea of testing the speed of function calls in different languages by implementing naive recursive fibonacci.

I made my own Firefox Readability Addon There are a plethora of existing readability addons, but they each prompt the scary warning: ⚠️ This add-on requires permission to: Access your data for all websites And that’s a scary thing to accept from an addon…

Performance Pitfalls in C# / .NET - Protobuf Arrays - repeated uint32 vs repeated fixed32 As I find myself doing often, I was recently benchmarking transfer of a random stream with gRPC.

Performance Pitfalls - Stamping a Last Seen Date / Bad Caching Introduction A common pitfall when writing an application is to track when a user was last seen or when some content was last viewed.

SELECT CASE WHEN 1 / 5 * 100.0 = 1 * 100.0 / 5 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS Huh Whether the headline query returns 1 or 0 depends entirely on your SQL engine of choice.

Performance Pitfalls in C# / .NET - List Contains A day ago, reddit user zigs asked on the csharp subreddit: What is the lowest effort, highest impact helper method you’ve ever written?

My stackoverflow question was closed, so here’s a blog post about CoreWCF I’m preparing a blog post on remote procedure calls (RPC) and Interprocess Communication between .NET Framework and dotnet 8, but while doing so I ran into an issue with a service g…