Zak Knill on /dev/knill

At Ably, we’ve solved production token streaming, so you don’t have to.

Disclosure I work on AI token streaming at Ably.

The ‘cloud-native’ architecture of the last decade is built on a 20-year-old assumption: that state lives in the database, and compute is stateless.

Agents used to be a thing you talked to synchronously.

Agents used to be a thing you talked to synchronously.

The agent can produce code faster than you can review it.

Apparently writing code is cheap now.

How is is possible that we’ve made incredible gains in the performance of models, but virtually no gains in the infrastructure that supports them?.

We’ve all seen the complaints.

SSE sucks I’m just going to cut to the chase here.

Disclaimer, I work for Ably; so I’m intimately familiar with the tech I mention here.

Realtime features make apps feel modern, collaborative, and up-to-date.

You get a phone call, but you’re away from your phone or you can’t answer it right at that moment.

Programmers should know a lot.. apparently.

…and why you really should!

You don’t need CRDTs You don’t need CRDTs for collaborative experiences.

Background I was first attracted to the dumbphones after seeing a series of articles on Hacker News.

There’s a rise in hosted database companies like Supabase, Neon, Turso, etc.

Miro and Figma have a bunch of collaboration features, in this post I’m going to break down two of those features and look at what you’d have to think about when building these into your own apps.

Imagine you’re presented with this problem: Design a system that can show the top 10 most popular songs over the last 10 seconds on the homepage of a music streaming service.

Some talk of one way and two way doors, but I prefer the ’egg test’.

Go 1.21 includes structured logging (with levels) as a standard library package.

SQLedge SQLedge uses Postgres logical replication to stream the changes in a source Postgres database to an SQLite database that can run on the edge.

Application developers often deploy their apps into a single area, generally represented by a handful of AZs in a single region.

The building of the program is the same as the building of the theory of it by and in the team of programmers.

Push stick drop I built https://pushstickdrop.dog to help train my dog potato.

The allure of radical change Radical changes are exciting.

An AI language model As an AI language model designed to mimic human conversation, ChatGPT has encountered its fair share of criticisms.

PackageMap I built https://packagemap.co to see how cohesive or coupled code was.

I work for Attest, we split our engineers largely down the seam of Backend and Frontend.

Most tips for code design exist to keep a lid on the exploding complexity of our systems.

There are some hills I am prepared to die on, this is probably not one of them, but it is irritating as hell.

This post is cross-posted from the Attest Product & Technology medium publication.

Abstract This is an explanation of the systems that lead an organisation to become addicted to on-call.

Tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individuals have access to some shared resource.

java-graphviz https://github.com/zknill/java-graphviz I wrote this tool to visualise the imports and dependencies between java classes.

Hiring is important for a business, it’s a high leverage activity that makes other activities easier or faster.

Vim + Java This post covers a usable vim setup for writing java.

After updating my m1 mac, and docker, the docker login to private repo commands started to fail. 1 Error saving credentials: error storing credentials - err: exit status 1, out: Post "http://ipc/registry/credstore-updated": dial unix /Users/user/Library/…

Penduluming feedback In my career I’ve received feedback on my comms.

One of the mental models I repeatedly use is the idea of a pendulum.

My TfL Santander cycles app stopped accepting my credit card details. symtoms When trying to pay for 24hr cycle access the app navigated to a ‘register card details’ page.

10 years of gmail For 10+ years I was a gmail user.

If you don’t like the game, change the battlefield.

One of my wonderful (and very self-reflective) colleagues reached out to me to ask; I tried to explain something in a PR, but I can see from the next question they asked that they hadn’t understood my first explanation.

A mental model is a like an analogy, it’s a shortcut to understanding.

A vending machine implementation in go.

This post is a response to Philip Heltweg’s “who wrote this shit” post.

The best most useful feedback follows a simple formula.

Ideation in product management is a broken tool that does not “create ideas”, as it professes to do.