Code - a programming blog

When I was younger, my favorite painting was The Building of FTL1 by John Harris: Looking back, I think what captivated me wasn’t the painting itself, but the feelings of awe and wonder that it evoked in me.

A few years ago when DevOps and microservices were all the rage, it seemed like the software industry had reached a consensus on what good practice looked like.

Why do we build monolithic applications?

Prompting coding agents has quickly become normal.

It’s not every day that a business strategy essay reshapes an industry, but Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha’s From Hierarchy to Intelligence is having an unusual run.

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To become angry belongs to everyone, and is an easy thing as is also giving and spending money; but to whom [one ought to do so], how much, when, for the sake of what and how - these no longer belong to everyone nor are easy. — Aristotle, Nichomachean Eth…

I’ve been using Claude code daily for a while now.

In his book The Nature of Technology, W.

Specifically the Brother HL-L2350DW.

In the 1940s Bell Aircraft used an experimental approach to build the first commercial helicopter:¹ At Gardenville, we built things, tested them, modified them until they worked, and then made the drawings. — The Bell Notes, Arthur M.

Twenty five years ago the most popular solution for web apps was known as “LAMP” (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).

We were asked to build an app in Go, Fortunately we were experienced programmers, Unfortunately our experience was with Java, Fortunately Go is simpler than Java, Unfortunately we wrote thousands of lines of code, Fortunately adding dependencies was easy,…

Chapter 15 from The Art of Prolog contains this dictionary implementation: lookup(Key, dict(Key,X,Left,Right), Value) :- !

Of all the AWS services, IAM seems to be the least well-understood.

Search engine startup Perplexity have introduced a new type of LLM model, which they call an “Online LLM”.

When things are broken, it’s easy to know what to do.

A few years ago I was working on a team that owned a web app for our enterprise customers.

Recently at work we’ve instituted a change to require code review by default.

For the past two years I’ve been experimenting with note-taking techniques, and have settled on one that works quite well.

I wrote a shell script called ch which lets you use ChatGPT from the command line.

Recruiters aside, does anybody actually enjoy using LinkedIn?

Hugo, the static site generation engine (which generates this site) has a useful function called safeHTML which marks an HTML string as “safe”, preventing it from being escaped and displayed literally.

Roughly a year ago I wrote about my attempts to tackle Go’s error handling problem using generics.

At work we’re in the midst of a big project to move our data analysis out of relational databases and into a datalake.

N.B.

Apache Spark is a chatty application; it logs early and often.

The release of Delta Lake 2.0.0 came with an exciting new feature called Change data feed which tracks row-level changes to a delta table.

Most programming language grammars are not context-free.

It sounds like such a simple question - but virtual memory makes measuring real memory use complicated.

One of the most complained about aspects of programming in Go is error handling.

A few weeks ago I was writing a macro loader for my JSON Processor, and I ran into an odd case where code I entered in the terminal was splitting differently to code I loaded from a file.

I usually program with vim inside a tmux session.

The POSIX Shell specification defines a minimalist shell language with few features compared to stalwarts like Bash.

Truthiness is the behavior of interpreting non-boolean values as true or false in a conditional context.

At any given time I have several projects on the go, and each one gets its own tmux session.

As of October 1st, the Linux kernel source¹ is comprised of over 22 million lines of code (excludes comments, blank lines)².

The most common way we introduce the stack data structure is by saying it’s like a spring-loaded plate dispenser, the kind found in a cafeteria: Indeed when I looked up stacks in an old computer architecture textbook¹ of mine I found: stacks are frequently

Code review is one of those hygienic things most developers believe they ought to do, like kitchen workers washing their hands, but don’t always do.

Unit testing is great way to build confidence that your code works.

The B 5000 mainframe computer was the first in a series of special machines released by the Burroughs Corporation.

A common misconception about Bash is that function names must follow the same rules that variables do.

Unix man pages are a mixed bag, but they’re faster than Google if you know where to look.

The Unix epoch time is the number of elapsed seconds since January 1st, 1970.

A modulino is a file which behaves like a library when it is imported, and like a script when executed.

Perl uses a simple form of garbage collection (GC) called reference counting.

Perl’s object system is not one of its most admired qualities.

One of the convenient things about Catalyst is it lets you register controller methods as actions, so you don’t need a separate routing table of URIs to controller methods.

Recently I’ve been researching how the Internet is organized, and working with whois data.

Last week I was analyzing server log data at work, and my boss asked me to plot it on a scatter chart.