What Now? Handling Errors in Large Systems

- What Now? Handling Errors in Large Systems function vote(btn, choice) { const widget = btn.closest('.vote-widget'); widget.querySelector('.user-vote').textContent = choice === 'tick' ? '✅' : '❌'; widget.querySelector('.result').style.display = 'block';...

Messing with bots

- Markov chain babblers, bogus php files, and more!...

The built-in storytelling of Rust

- Although I technically own the game and played it once a decade ago; I had a horrible time playing Rust. Other players called me the N-word several times, I died almost instantly, my frame rates were trash, and after three hours I put it down and never played it again. Despite...

Reverse engineering Codex CLI to get GPT-5-Codex-Mini to draw me a pelican

Building blobd: single-machine object store with sub-millisecond reads and 15 GB/s uploads

- Deep dive into blobd, an object store designed for constant low latency reads using async Rust, io_uring and atomic writes...

Zig Builds Are Getting Faster

A Very Early History of Algebraic Data Types

- Been quiet around here! I’ve been putting almost all of my writing time into Logic for Programmers and my whole brain is book-shaped. Trust me, you do not want to read my 2000-word rant on Sphinx post-build LaTeX customization. But I spent the past week in a historical rabbit...

Are We Chasing Language Hype Over Solving Real Problems?

- Exploring the trend of rewriting existing software in new programming languages, this article delves into the balance between innovation and practicality in software development....

Embedding Wren in Hare

- I’ve been on the lookout for a scripting language which can be neatly embedded into Hare programs. Perhaps the obvious candidate is Lua – but I’m not particularly enthusiastic about it. When I was evaluating the landscape of tools which are “like Lua, but not Lua”, I found an...

Typechecker Zoo

- Typechecker Zoo As a fun side project, I've built four literate Rust implementations spanning 50 years of type theory research, from Milner's Algorithm W to modern dependent type systems. I've tried to make each implementation as readable and understandable as possible, with...

Optimizing My Disk Usage Program

- Increasing performance by reducing thread scheduling overhead and lock contention....

VibeTunnel's first AI-anniversary

- It's been one month since we released the first version of VibeTunnel, and since in the AI world time is so much faster, let's call it VibeTunnel's first anniversary!...

On Reifying Nested Closures in Rust

Fast Tensor Canonicalization in Rust

- Fast Tensor Canonicalization in Rust I recently had a need to do fast tensor canonicalization, but the library ecosystem for this was lacking. In physics and differential geometry, manipulating tensors and especially bringing them into canonical form under their index symmetries...

Iterators and adaptors

- Previously it was mentioned that Python and C++ do iteration quite differently. Python has "statefull" objects that have a .next() method that returns a new object or throws a StopIteration exception. Incidentally Rust does exactly the same thing, except that it uses an optional...

Writing a backup service for Ubuntu in Rust

- While performing some routine maintenance of my Ubuntu server, $ docker compose pull $ docker compose up -d I ran into an interesting situation where nginx-proxy-manager failed to serve my blog properly, I wasn't sure what the issue was but these types of issues are usually...

Building a fast website with the MASH stack in Rust

- Maud, Axum, SQLx, and HTMX make for a snappy UX and pleasant DX....

[Video] Scour Presentation @ Rust NYC

- Here’s the recording of my presentation about Scour at the Rust NYC Meetup (link). The presentation goes through the motivation for Scour and aspects of the architecture that make it fast. Slides: You can read more about some of the topics mentioned in the presentation here:...

Pinning Down "Future Is Not Send" Errors

- If you use async Rust and Tokio, you are likely to run into some variant of the "future is not Send" compiler error. While transitioning some sequential async code to use streams, a friend suggested a small technique for pinning down the source of the non-Send errors. It helped...

Comparing 13 Rust Crates for Extracting Text from HTML

- Applications that run documents through LLMs or embedding models need to clean the text before feeding it into the model. I'm building a personalized content feed called Scour and was looking for a Rust crate to extract text from scraped HTML. I started off using a library...

Why C# Developers Should Also Learn Rust, and What It Can Teach Them

- As a C# developer, you might wonder why you should invest time learning Rust, a systems programming language. After all, C# is a powerful, versatile, and high-level language with a vast ecosystem and a wide range of applications. However, learning Rust can expand your...

A look back at 2024

- This year I’m not next to the Christmas tree surrounded by reindeers and blinking lights, but I’m in sunny Carvoeiro on the south coast of Portugal with my family, relaxing and reflecting on the past year. To keep an annual tradition, I would like to share with you some of the...

Unnecessary Optimization in Rust: Hamming Distances, SIMD, and Auto-Vectorization

- If you're developing an application and find yourself running a benchmark whose results are measured in nanoseconds... you should probably stop and get back to more important tasks. But here we are. I'm using binary vector embeddings to build Scour, a service that scours noisy...

Unsafe for work

- Before we start, have a look at this image. It is from a German book from the early Nineties, and it features some very interesting cover artwork. A knight with a cape and a big bushy mustache rides a friendly green dragon. A castle, a dolphin, and some animals are in the...