Interview With Bakpakin - Dec 2025
Bakpakin made Janet. I asked him about the project and community.
Gradual Automation With Do Nothing Scripts - Oct 2025
Save time and mental load with this gradual automation methodology
Interview With Technomancy - Jul 2025
Technomancy made Leinigen, leads the Fennel project and makes beautiful games!
Janet Commonplace - Jul 2025
Questions, resources and thoughts about Janet, a minimalist Clojure-like with native binaries.
WIP Coupling Language and Geography - May 2025
Historical linguistics has a lot to teach us about API/DSL design. While a decades old codebase may be a crime scene, human languages have endured magnitudes more churn!
Lisp Curriculum - Sep 2024
Learn Scheme, Common Lisp ->maybe Clojure, with these books.
To Forge Deeper Thought - Jul 2024
The curiosity to bravely multisociate insights from all fields breeds innovation.
Lisp Commonplace - Jul 2024
Racket, Gerbil, Common Lisp… Too many options!
Golang Commonplace Book - May 2024
My personal Go refresher
Deliberate Practice for Developers - Mar 2024
Athletes and fighters go to the gym, how do zen software monks work out?
Software Architecture Today - Jan 2024
tl;dr: Our architecture (software) is about the boundaries between, not the things themselves.
Revolt of the Simple - Jan 2024
tl;dr: Recklessly adopting tools because big tech uses them is the biggest problem in tech.
The Future of Pro User Software - Sep 2023
Better abstractions and simpler environments will free our minds and creativity
Open Standards - Sep 2023
Why did XMPP fail?
Design Docs - Jul 2023
Oxide
Oxide has very interesting Requests for Discussion which seem just right.
Colophon - Jun 2023
I overthought designing this blog.
Big Open Source - May 2023
tl;dr: Open source is a moat for big tech. SaaS is the best startups can do right now.
Architecting Observability - May 2023
tl;dr: 10 construction workers stand and watch one man dig a hole, that’s the cloud today!
Walmart's Hybdrid Cloud - Feb 2023
Walmart Cloud Native Platform (WCNP) is an interesting case study (though proliferating buzzwords garner the odd chuckle).
SaaS Propaganda - Jan 2023
I play devil’s advocate, steelmanning SaaS’ business use.
Are "70%" of Bugs Memory Safety Issues? - Jan 2023
We often hear this 70% number thrown around (in the Rust community in particular). Is it true?
Antikubernetes Propaganda - Oct 2022
Once upon a time in a simpler world, there were but system admins. All these middleware, DNS, SMTP, firewall, network and security admins hadn’t yet splintered - the sysadmin responsable for all, gluing all teams together, making a system of discrete parts made by engineers and DBAs. Rare is the organization which has reached the scale to benefit from this specifications. More commonly, we poor moderns create systems too complex to wrap our heads around or escape (shackled to the costliest compute known to man).
Anticloud Propaganda - Jul 2022
tl;dr: What’s your cost per request (cpr)? How much does more monitoring and logging cost for what gain in uptime/reliability/visibility and more importantly, customer satisfaction?
Docker the Company's Death - Jul 2022
How to commercialize open source?
How to Learn Go - May 2022
First Steps
For new programmers:
Alex Edwards' Let's Go and Let's Go Further teach core patterns, project structure and API development. They're the best introduction for a new programmer.For experienced programmers:
- Tour of Go is the best place to get a feel for the language. A few hours at most.
- Pick one:
- Matt Holiday’s video course is in-depth and covers a lot of ground.
- Learn Go with Tests
- Effective Go
What’s next?
- Cloud Native Go - Titmus
- 100 Go Mistakes
- Style guides by Uber and Google
- Writing an Interpreter in Go & Writing a Compiler in Go - Thorsten Ball
Make a server, but not some demo thing, go all the way.
The Customer is Always Wrong - Jun 2021
How many times have you thought or heard: “What if there were a tool so powerful you could write your specifications in it, it would make them happen?” Well… That’s what a programming languageis! “No, no. I mean in human language, for real people!” Well, that’s COBOL!
About the Go Compiler - Jan 2018
edit: a recent discussion which will shed much more light on this https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/1994ols/the_go_compiler_needs_to_be_smarter_2020/