About

I'm @brandur, an occasional writer, and engineer at Stripe and previously Heroku.

I most often talk about web APIs, Postgres, Rust, software safety and resilience, efficient human interfaces, and running.

Articles

Sequences: A Modest, Contra-garden Travel Project
In the spirit of the continued production of independent content, I'm running a two-week photography and writing project in Berlin called Sequences. June 4, 2019
Building a Robust Live Reloader with WebSockets and Go
A walkthrough of the design of a live reload feature for the static site generator that builds this site, touching on fsnotify, WebSockets, and the curious case of file 4913. May 28, 2019
SortSupport: Sorting in Postgres at Speed
How Postgres makes sorting really fast by comparing small, memory-friendly abbreviated keys as proxies for arbitrarily large values on the heap. February 4, 2019

Older articles available here.

Encoding H.265/HEVC for QuickTime with FFmpeg
Using FFmpeg and High Efficiency Video Coding (HVEC/H.265) to produce tiny video files that play very well in QuickTime. May 28, 2019

Older fragments available here.