About
My name is Brandur Leach (@brandur). I'm an engineer at Stripe, and am interested in service engineering, APIs, Vim, Tmux, Ruby, Go, terminal productivity, running, fixed gear riding, history, urban design, and metal.
Articles
- Using Atomic Transactions to Power an Idempotent API
Part one of a series on getting easy data correctness by building APIs on the transactional machinery of Postgres.
- The Limits of Copy-on-write: How Ruby Allocates Memory
Why Ruby's scheme for memory allocation doesn't play nicely with copy-on-write, and how a compacting garbage collector will help.
- How Postgres Makes Transactions Atomic
A dive into the mechanics that allow Postgres to provide strong atomic guarantees despite the chaotic entropy of production.
- Pseudo-HTML and Pidgin CSS: Building an Email Newsletter
Building a toolchain for sending a newsletter, and the dismal state of HTML and CSS in email.
- The Accidental Evangelist
Lets talk about the bad aspects of the technology we use as well as the good. Better information will lead to better decisions in the next generation of technical architecture.
Older articles are available here.
Fragments
- The City That Tried to Buy Itself
Thoughts on governments protecting tenants by buying buildings and raging against the law of supply and demand.
- Depickling, Gadgets, and Chains: The Class of Exploit That Unraveled Equifax
How unsafe deserialization leads to arbitrary code execution.
- Unsubscribe: The Noisy Death of Email Marketing
How increasing volume and diminishingly quality will lead to the irrelevance of the email marketing industry.
- Patronage In the Age of Free
Thoughts on how to make the creation of high quality content on the internet sustainable.
- A Year of Counting Calories
409 days of tracking all meals and exercise.
Older fragments are available here.
