Chris Armstrong

Coding agents are quick to synthesise comments from context, but bad at reading and maintaining them, which makes every comment a mine waiting for the next agent to trip.

AIs are remarkably good at putting together code, but the same problems can 10x the wreckage of your environment when applied to operations because production doesn't have the same guardrails.

Development update for ocgtk (a set of GTK4 bindings for OCaml), including upcoming support for signals and interfaces, expanded GLib type coverage, and packaging improvements to support other operating systems.

The O in OCaml is for its object-oriented extension, but I needed a way to emulate the constraints of inheritance without it.

Even though I was focussed only on generating GTK bindings for OCaml, I still had to consider all the other libraries it depends on.

The "glue" part of OpenTelemetry instrumentation is where each vendor hands you a ball of sticky tape and tells you to install it in your environment.

ocgtk, a set of GTK4 bindings for OCaml, is now available on opam as preview1 release

Introducing ocgtk, a new set of GTK4 bindings for OCaml generated from GObject Introspection data.

Last night I presented a talk at the Sydney AI Engineering Meetup on using agentic coding loops with lesser known languages and less-capable models, of which you can find the videa and slides linked

Free AI credits, a side project picked on a whim, and a false sense of progress left me with a codebase I couldn't read.

What role does programming language choice make when targeting serverless environments, and how does OCaml stack up against popular serverless development languages?

Is it unusual as developers that we create software but also the software that helps us build?

Observability is not just about production systems.

Wrap-up on my time at the ICFP '25 conference in Singapore

ICFP, smaws gets multiple scheduler support

Update on smaws, an AWS SDK for OCaml

OCaml has no official solution to cross-compilation, with many disparate options developed for different use cases.

ppxlib is usually just thought of as a tool for transforming OCaml code, but it can be used to generate new code too.

OCaml has some facilities for eliminating unused code - I explore what it can do, and how you structure your code to take advantage of it

Nostalgia for old operating systems and applications is misplaced.

My (unsuccessful) investigation into removing unused code from the compiled output of OCaml, including all the web archeology and deep-dive into how native binaries are formed.

An AWS SAM application with a lot of APIs can still hit the CloudFormation stack resource limit.

How to do basic administration tasks, like add users to groups, with the IAM Identity Center when managing multiple AWS Accounts and user access

Storybook 7 has changed the visual regression story, no longer relying on storyshots.

Some notes on using ppx_expect to unit test

ocaml-cfgen gets resource reference, IAM policy generation and what's next

A new project I'm working on to generate CloudFormation templates from OCaml bindings, and the problems that motivated its creation

The design of CSS does not make styling HTML more maintainable - in fact, it seems to actively work against it.

Database ORMs like Prisma can make managing data access layers to SQL databases much easier for developers, but if used with a database that has dramatically different semantics and API, the benefits of abstraction are lost and turned into a maze of horro…

It takes time to build up a sense of what to instrument to get the most out of your investment in observability, and it pays to know what primitives you have at your disposal and how to use them effectively.

Learn about packaging your NodeJS-based AWS Lambda functions with esbuild for improved cold start times and reduced deployment package size

Starting a new Reason project for native development is relatively straightforward.

Learn how to build a type-safe JSON API in ReScript that runs on AWS Lambda

Learn how to use ReScript to write and deploy a simple AWS Lambda application

Add retries, timeouts and cancellation to your fetch() calls without including another HTTP library

Building transaction applications on DynamoDB can be a challenge - here is a few tips I've learned to ensure it is successful

When would you use DynamoDB?

Managing multiple accounts is a headache on AWS, especially when you're trying to maintain best practice compliance and when operations isn't your day job.

Setting up a test of code that uses node-fetch with jest and Typescript

Setting up CloudWatch Logging for your API Gateway is painful - here's a script to make it easy

Understanding what is Amazon Cognito and how it is used

Running your own Jitsi instance on EC2 with an easy-to-deploy CloudFormation solution

A guide for getting started with dynaglue

Annoucing dynamodb-csv-export-import, a utility for importing the CSVs generated by the AWS DynamoDB Console 'Export to csv' feature

An overview of this blog