Blain Smith

The industry has a maddening relationship with solved problems.

Recently, I wrote about using Go's net/http/httptrace to get the per-phase timing breakdown for HTTP requests - DNS, TCP, TLS, and server processing.

I was writing a controller that watches Kubernetes HPAs and Istio VirtualServices for changes and coordinates between the two.

RFC 10008 was published on June 15, 2026 and defines a new HTTP method: QUERY.

net/http/httptrace has been in the standard library since Go 1.7 and most Go developers I talk to have never used it.

Walk into any old stone church and look up.

I have been writing more and more Hare over the past year and finding places where the ecosystem still has gaps worth filling.

Hey, dipshit.

Bluesky went down for half its users for about 8 hours on Monday.

I asked my son if he could learn to build anything, what would he want to build.

I've been building an API recently with a stack that I think hits a sweet spot of just enough structure to keep a team productive, not so much that you're fighting the tools.

Hare doesn't have a package manager.

I came across an article recently that references something called Crocker's Rules.

There is something quietly remarkable about the people who built the foundations of modern computing.

In World War Z, Israel survives the zombie apocalypse because of a simple rule: if nine intelligence officials agree on something, the tenth must assume they're all wrong and explore alternatives.

In 1995, I built my first website.

There's a particular kind of engineer I've been noticing more and more lately.

I am surprised I haven't written this sooner, especially since I have written about How I Write HTTP Clients.

There's been a recurring thought I've been having as I've gotten older and I'm coming up on being in tech for 30 years.

Does this happen to you?

It had occurred to me that I haven't really solidified my position on coding with "AI" so I thought I would jot down some thoughts on the subject.

I don't sit down to design systems with complexity as the point.

As a software engineer who's been through the cycle of tooling bloat and complexity creep, I've come full circle to embrace radical simplicity.

There's something quietly dignified about a clean commit history, well written patch/pull requests, and documentation.

I’ve been writing code for about thirty years now.

Whenever someone asks me about learning Go and what online resources I would recommend they check out I always point them to Go by Example.

Recently, Adële wrote about how to block non-human crawlers by setting a cookie to prove a human is visiting a website.

This past January 13th I turned 43, and as I approached that day, I spent a lot of time over winter break reflecting on the past decades I worked in the tech industry.

I have been involved in writing software professionally for almost 3 decades.

Well, I think I finally hit a breaking point and I am officially done with the bullshit spreading through the "big" tech industry lately and I don't want to be a part of it anymore.

Today I get to release the first working version of static-httpd.

TL;DR Read the source code for https://git.sr.ht/~blainsmith/hare-bitcask.

When building new services, gRPC can be very handy to not only define those services, but also generate a lot of the boilerplate code for server implementations and client libraries.

I've been reading Drew Devault's blog for quite some time.

I guess society celebrates turning 40 as a big milestone birthday.

I read David Crawshaw's recent post about the same topic and I thought it would be nice to do the same.

I have written a lot of HTTP clients that talk to 3rd party APIs over the years and there have been some patterns that have emerged and so I thought I would share them in hopes they help others.

I get this question a decent amount from people who don't lift and my answers usually consist of: "I spend all day staring at a computer screen and it offers a nice balance to work life behind a desk."

Over the years I've been programming and people ask me what I do for a living, I try to explain to them as best I can.

I managed to switch my site over to using Zola.

Update: This idea got popular enough that I decided to turn it into a tool.

If you haven't noticed already I really love plain text so I thought I would find some plain text protocols that are used in different software systems.

Every since the world started shutting down when COVID-19 hit I've been finding myself reverting back to simpler things.

Well, my undergraduate career is finally over.

The crypto/ed25519 package was added to the standard library in Go 1.13.

This tutorial assumes you have the following software installed. https://collectd.org https://www.docker.com collectd is a general purpose system metrics collection tool that supports various plugins for reading metrics from sources and writing results to…

A long time ago I gave a TEDx talk about how I ended up where I am and the choices I made.

This word is used throughout the startup and tech worlds and it annoys the shit out of me.

On a few different occasions I've needed to keep a registry of interface implementations to iterate over later on.

This may have been the first job that when I look back over the years I am absolutely shocked with how much I have been exposed to and learned.