Posts tagged: dev

This is great, beautifully captures a modern backend view of https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/. I honestly resonate with almost all of this. I have found myself in more trouble than help when trying to fully vibe out a project. It never refactors, it leaves it shit everywhere, it mostly does what you say, until you get to something that seems easy, so you try to do it yourself, but you break its brittle piece of shit into pieces any time you try to touch it. AI coding help is great, mcp seems like it really has some game changing abilities, but hands of vibe coded crap aint there yet for me.

Bugs exist when your test-enforced implementation fails to match the behavior described in your documentation. Without documentation a bug is just undefined behavior.

This is quite an interesting thought, so does this mean that, none of my undocumented side projects have bugs? no I think there is still some implied behavior that naming things covers. a function get_bucket_contents implies doing something wtih s3, getting stuff from your local filesystem or crashing would be considered a bug. I think the argument here is that if I start mining bitcoin when you call get_bucket_contents and I have not documented it that this is a feature not a bug. If I were to take this a step further, now do I need to document that this does not also start a bitcoin miner? maybe this is more of an unwanted feature than a bug, I’m convincing myself more and more.

So it’s back to plan A: taking a year off. I plan on using this time to focus on my health–something I haven’t prioritized while working as a CEO / Founder of a startup.

Wish you the best Will, you have given us textual and rich, and from what I can tell left it in some great hands.

All I can say for certain is that I would like to write more. Writing scratches many of the same itches as software development, and it is a skill I’d like to nurture.

Go get em Will, write to your hearts desire, and resist the urge to make an SSG company this time.

Now “too much magic” is not the same thing as “bad magic”, although they are often conflated. Bad magic is when the implementation details leak out from the level below. This can manifest itself as cryptic errors that reference the magic’s implementation.

Under 2000 everything is happy, green field. Any decision you have made is relatively easy to back out of (barring you making a library with downstream users), but as you go, regret kicks in. Regret we didn’t make that pydantic 2 upgrade earlier, as new features become more apealing. Regret that we chose sqlite for simplicity, speed, agility, and now we might need robust and distributed. Regret that you chose a front end framework, or to have a front end at all to a backend problem. Regret that you put 6 layers of abstraction on your db early on and now that you understand the problem you want different abstractions, but all of your endpoints deeply depend on the current one.

Vibe coding will not save you, it will only make these wrong decisions for you without the context that you have. You will hate it’s decisions more because you had no input into some of them.

“Gradually roll out your releases to a small group of people”

~ roughly what prime said (I’m listening live)

This really hit home with me, tests can be so good at making sure that we dont repeat bugs and that laser focused things work, tests are generally small and focused, but this does not replace some sort of integration testing. These days very few things are written as a monolith, and hence there are a lot of interactions that really need to play well together accross various systems.

They call out Crowdstrike here, which took down the world blue screening critical windows systems everywhere in 2024. It was revealed that a small changed was rushed through and skipped critical rollout paths since it seemed like a small change. Crowdstrike also runs at a super low kernel level of access and a small memory bug can kill the system.

This episode really got me thinking about the difference between HA and DR and my approach to each one. They talk about it from the perspective of a cach cow kind of app rather than a homelab or internal tooling, but think of HA as 9’s how many 9s are we willing to pay for, tink of DR as dollars how many dollars will we loose during the period of recovery. So much more in the episode, a lot of talk around cloud vendors and what they give you vs a purpose build platform with HA and DR in mind.

Great talk from Lous Rossman! TLDR you don’t own it, and stop pointing the finger calling everyone else an idiot for supporting the other brand, cause your’s probably also has different issues.

This is an absolute banger of a review by prime and Dylan Beetle. I love the similar takes with different perspectives, would really like to see them podcast together, but this one way style interview does really well to cover a lot of issues in open source, rug pulls, version pinning, thankless maintainers, what its like to open source from a large company.

redis has all of their default self documented configs hosted here. You can pull the default redis.conf for any of the major releases.

Good report, make notes later

valkey appears to be the largest open source fork of redis that was forked just before their transition to the new source available licenses.

One notable thing missing from the readme is how to run with docker, which I saw in the valkey-py docs.

docker run -p 6379:6379 -it valkey/valkey:latest

You can install the python library with

Damn prime makes an interesting point near then end of this video. He’s seen a bunch of people able to just throw down charts and shit at their company and end up being “the coding guy” cause they proompted something once. In a way I can relate, I got into software in a similar way, but at a time that it took a lot more hard work, understanding , and copy past from the right stack overflow. Based on some of the people around me at the time I can only imagine how some people must feel like they got pushed into it without wanting it, and now are building something they don’t know anything about with no care about it or care to build any expertise. Is the future proompted charts from enterprise chatgpt or do we only continue growing more need for software from here.

Big fan of Primes setup. I was not far off of his setup before he really came on the scene, but I’ve picked up a ton of nuggets from him and how he operates. I took his first developer productivity course on Front End Masters as it came out.

It is interesting to see him roll back his ansible scripts for bash scripts here. I converted my setup to ansible after watching his first, but have also since rolled back to bash scripts for quite similar reasons. Ansible is great for remote tasks that need to be done on a fleet of machines, but like he says here overkill for this purpose and ends up something that you need to read the docs for every change to your dotfiles.

Unlike prime I’ve really leaned harder on installing everything in a docker image and developing out of a docker image. I’ve long built docker images of my dotfiles with the idea that its nice to be able to just use them on other machines, but it rarely happened.

In the past year I’ve moved bazzite, an immutable distro. It comes with podman and distrobox, so I install very little on it, a few flatpaks from the store for brave and signal, but most of what I really use day to day comes from my devtainer. It’s nice...

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Don’t stop learning! Stop trying because you have a doomer outlook on ai, llms, industry and think they are taking over. If you have no hope for the future, if you stop now you are cementing in that you will be no good and the ai will be better. Many, maybe most of us in this industry go here by hard work, long nights of learning, trying to solve problems that our job had. If llms take over then the world is going to be a whole lot different, it will be a world you cannot predict or plan for. For now put your head down and succeed in the world we have today.

TEEJ has some great thoughts on this whole sentiment, put this on for you morning walk or whatever you do.

nice overview of availability measurements and what they really mean. The crazy world we live in today depends on so many things runnig, its also so hard to measure your uptime, The uptime metrics can mean a lot of different things. The site is up and accepting traffic, but can users make changes or submit orders, there is a lot more to it than just up or down. I really appreciate Brittany’s story from Nike nested in there.

Just tried using my twitter api key for the first time in quite awhile. Apps now need to be tied to projects in order to work. It looks like projects are where pricing comes into play. Thankfully they still give a free tier for doing small time things for myself. You can really see the effect that llms have on these things though as it is 5x more expensive to read posts than to make posts currently. Data is the new gold for these kind of companies.

Great panel of software folks at open sauce. It was interesting hearing from all these creators from the perspective of an open sauce panel.

This was an eye opening video into agentic editing workflows.

Dfferent ai tools use different rules files, windsurf uses .windsurfrules.

Test out your rules file by having it say something at the beginning of the output to verify that the rules are being applied correctly.

He suggests to use this key rule for debugging purposes, otherwise you are guessing to what rules if any it is following.

This is a pretty great episode talking shop with typecraft. They talk setups, cameras, content creation. I found them talking about their linux setups particularly interesting. Dax talked about his flow from building his own machines to using reliablesite.com.

Dax hates on c-a, both typecraft and dax use c-s, which normally freezes a terminal, we can all agree that is useless. I use the default c-b, it seems fine for me.

Dax talks about terminal.shop and how they originally planned to have a web front end, but after they had so much success they stuck with it. now they are leaning harder into it and are building out integrations with a bunch of languages and an api, but no front end.