1,807 tweets, and 3,625 including replies.
2018
April
- On Rust compile times: I was worried they’d trend out of control as code grows, but they’ve been fine.For a big project, incremental is on par with a fast Ruby test suite, a fraction of a normal one, or an infinitesimal slice of a degenerate megasuite (found at Big Ruby shops).
- RT @dcurtis: In order of importance for San Francisco government—possibly the worst major city government in the country—to address:
1. Dr…- (Also, while Python and Ruby were more or less the same language when they appeared, this illustrates a stark difference in progress since. I'd be happy to see even one change half as ambitious as either of these out of Ruby Core.)
- I read PEP 492 (async/await) and PEP 484 (type hints) for Python, and was impressed to see they've been implemented for years already.
(Probably don't use interpreted languages beyond scripting, but) Python is really moving.https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0492/https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0484/- I have a hard time not thinking about the tens of thousands of human hours lost rescuing state in systems that aren't safe at rest.
Here’s a tiny spark of a thought on baking resilience into online services. The 500 test: https://brandur.org/fragments/the-500-test- It looks like there's a good chance that a native form of async/await will be coming to Rust's core (as opposed to existing in packaged layers of macro spaghetti above it). This is really, *really* good news.
https://github.com/withoutboats/rfcs/blob/async-aw…- It was a tremendously beautiful rainy morning in San Francisco today. It's rare to ever see the city this lush. https://t.co/vD8Ti8Vlf3
- The more I play with GraphQL, the more it seems like the obvious way forward for web APIs.
Strong conventions, introspection (GraphiQL is amazing), and improved change resilience (explicit field requests). You can still design great APIs minus the mystique/dogmatism of REST.- For all the silly platitudes thrown around in our field, the exaltation of refactoring isn't one of them — aggressive and continuous refinement is the only path to beautiful, sustainable software.
Any code that ossifies after being first written is almost certainly bad code.- Having lived in San Francisco’s SOMA district for five years before finally getting out, I’ll never again underestimate the value of silence.
It’s the most minute luxury in life. When you have access to it, you think nothing of it. When you don’t, you miss it dearly.March
- I spent some time building a toy web service in Rust and wrote about some of the best parts. This piece explores a type-safe actor framework, Postgres-friendly concurrency model, and middleware with compiler-enforced modularity.https://brandur.org/rust-web
- Patriot (on Prime Video), a dark comedy about a nihilistic spy whose work in Europe leaves behind an ever more fragile web of loose ends, is some of the best TV made in years. Beautiful writing and cinematography. Highly recommended. https://t.co/GeAXU76Gxn
- For those who made it here by way of HN — I want to clarify that despite my occasional critique, Rust is my favorite programming language, by far.
No project gets everything right, but Rust (and its great core + community) has consistently been more right than anything else.- RT @heinrichhartman: "Suddenly, the absurdity of the thought hit me like a ton of bricks: I was sitting in an Onsen looking forward to the…
- Application-level validations are optimistic — they work as long as you're 100% bug-free, and at low concurrency.
Database contraints are the only way to move from hoping data is valid to *knowing* it is. Use them. Don't use a database without them.https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2018/03/19/postgres…- It's always surprising to see how bad most people are with docs, even when they're often the ones suffering for it.
You see countless of these in a day:factory.create_widget() # creates a widgetBut comments explaining what a widget is and why it's there? ~Non-existent.- Mocks and stubs are a powerful idea, but they're the unstable box of ancient dynamite of software engineering — more dangerous than they're worth.
There's nothing quite like tests that are 90% mocks and succeed at nothing but testing a specific internal implementation.- Really impressed by Google Cloud Platform so far. It's like AWS minus the obfuscated Amazonspeak, and with a better console.
The only service I miss is ACM — zero-hassle HTTPS is *such* a killer feature. A Kubernetes/Let's Encrypt Rube Goldberg machine just isn't the same.- Even so, I have a suspicion that the best internal frameworks are better than the best open-source ones (even if less feature-rich). You can always move and improve faster with fewer users, and by cultivating a feeling of shared responsibility, you could do great things.
- Internal software frameworks are usually bad because they’re write-once refactor-never affairs.
Tragedy of the commons plays a big part — it’s easier to slather on a new layer of mud than to go back and apply a fix to the core, and future maintenance is everybody’s problem.- (Mini-review: Sounds great relative to other point sources, but it's no stereo. Siri may be behind, but is fine for clock/timer/weather, which is most of what talking cylinders get used for. Spotify over AirPlay is surprisingly okay. Best alarm clock ever made.)
- The HomePod sure makes a gorgeous room accent. The first Apple product in ages that I've willingly ordered in white. https://t.co/1qYTEesA1T
- These days when I move from a modern TV show to a modern game, like from “Altered Carbon” to “Horizon Zero Dawn”, paradoxically the latter feels more lifelike despite having no live actors. Far more immersive anyway.
(And wow, what a beautiful game.)- The existential danger being that it becomes another Haskell where you need a PhD to write it.
Languages need a user space that lets them be used effectively even without understand every nuance of the type and concurrency systems along with all other implementation details.- To balance my Rust enthusiasm with the occasional dose of cold reality: I've not once been able to use a crate to a meaningful extent without looking at its source code.
Docs are rich in type annotations, but useless. `examples` dirs are a great idea, but almost always trivial.February
- (I was also pleasantly surprised by how little code I had to change to adopt modern Rust toolchains, despite having not committed in ~a year. The build was even still working even though it's not version locked. What you've heard is true: the language really is stabilizing.)
- redis-cell 0.2.2 is released, with some great contributions from the @CartoDB team for correctness at very fast replenish rates. Its code has also been modernized, Clippy (lint) integrated, and the latest Rustfmt conventions adopted.https://github.com/brandur/redis-cell
- When it comes to mega-scale projects like the Transbay Tube, we may as well be Middle Age Britain looking back at the grand ruins left by Rome. But for us, the technology to build them isn't lost. It's the capacity to do so within the bounds of a sane budget that's vanished.
- So good to see someone with a high profile talking about this. When a state loses its ability to build capital infrastructure, it loses agency over its own development. California's is long gone.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/96860887991427…- Habits are frustrating. It’s so easy to break a good one and so hard to break a bad one.
Bad habits are on autopilot, but good ones, even if you have them going for weeks, easily turn one missed day turns into two, then three, and before you know it, are gone.- Running `kubectl apply -f kubernetes/` on a directory of (versioned) configuration files and watching an entire service mesh converge to its new target state is downright magical.
- Instead of every web worker permanently holding a conn (common practice in say, Ruby), you take one for a short critical section only.
Input is received, parsed and validated, *then* you acquire a conn. DB ops are run, and it's released before encoding and sending a response.- A connection pool that releases connections on `Drop` (i.e., destructor) when they leave scope like r2d2 in Rust opens up a new paradigm for connection management that is *so much* more resource efficient.
N workers can plausibly share << N connections. https://github.com/sfackler/r2d2- Here's Actix, a web framework for Rust, edging its way to the top of TechEmpower's lists to sit soundly alongside the highly optimized C/C++/Java code that's normally found there.
(Don't put too much stock in benchmarks, but this is pretty cool.)https://github.com/actix/actix-web https://t.co/nLPQKgQJL2- v1.10: Builds are a little faster and more reliable, tests can cache results, runtime and the GC are faster, minor API tweaks, no significant language changes.
This is what I like about Go — you don't need a flashy new language feature to cut a release.https://golang.org/doc/go1.10- The more I think about the idea of no GC in production, the more I like it — memory growth that's almost perfectly bounded.
Here's my Rust service's memory use over ~5 hours running a periodic workload. The footprint is tiny, and baseline so flat that you could us it as a level. https://t.co/3mvXJu8LGC- "5 Centimeters per Second" has a slow, subtle beauty that I doubt anything in western film will ever approach. Makoto Shinkai (see also "Your Name" which is even better), is a genius. https://t.co/CbaOx3roEp
- The only sticky problems I've run into so far:
1. Cross-compiling is still hard because of OpenSSL and libpq (good for Go for jettisoning them).2. The classic Postgres Achilles heel of backend limits. I can plausibly spawn a million threads, but am maxed out at 25 connections.- My first Rust service with Diesel/Cloud SQL backend running on managed Kubernetes.
Lots of cool technologies to get there including cross-compilation to a musl target, multi-stage Docker build with a final tiny ~12 MB Alpine-based image, and binary-embedded Diesel migrations. https://t.co/2hxkdve1Hy- Interesting musings on the price of art from a musician who earlier in his career was selling $20 albums and now makes a few bucks from internet streaming.
The old model of buying a CD for a few songs was pretty broken, but the new one seems to be too.https://overcast.fm/+FCH_uYgZ4- The experience reminded me that language tooling is as important to developer experience as syntax.
It's a new idea to offer integrated package and SDK version management as a core part of a language's distribution. When you've seen the light (e.g., Rust), it's hard to go back.- After realizing that the SDK I'd downloaded from Microsoft was for .NET Core 2.0 and I needed 1.1, I looked up how to install a new target framework via the `dotnet` command before realizing that of course you can't do that.
I am so spoiled by `rustup`.- Clippy is hands down the best linter ever built. By far.
With stylistic concerns automated away with Rustfmt, the linter's job becomes one to catch real problems. Clippy is so good at it that I was actually learning better Rust by fixing its warnings.https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rust-clippy- New wave languages (Go, Rust, Swift) tend to have gotten this right: mandatory type annotations in function signatures, optional interpolation in function bodies.
Many, many before them, didn't.- Explicitness (especially around type annotations) is a value widely and consistently held by people who've written a lot of code.
Reading someone else's code, or your own a year from now, you *always* wish that they/you'd taken the time to type a few extra characters.- (Although it doesn't rule out Stripe-style "implicit" versioning that's pinned to users. It shares the same problems but to a lesser degree — incremental progress and upgrades are possible, and new users are always locked to the latest.)
- When you create your API's /v2/, you have a choice between keeping /v1/ online forever or deprecating it and off-boarding users.
The former slows you down and latter exhausts you. This reason alone is why public APIs with non-negligible users should have only one version.- Impressed that Google Cloud will give you a 2-node HA Postgres cluster for ~$15/mo; the same as the cheapest single-node RDB.
Sustained use pricing is also more user-friendly than reserved instances — true elastic computing minus capital costs and math.https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/postgres/pricing- (The above is upsert in Diesel by the way. Out of the box it supports syntax for special Postgres directives like `ON CONFLICT` and the `excluded` table — all type safe and with syntax correctness checked at compile time.)
- Watching rustfmt reflow code to satisfy maximum line width has got to be the most satisfying (small) thing in programming.
This is exactly how styling tools should be built: strong default conventions, but changeable via a conf file that's checked in with the project. https://t.co/0AQrPhkRFl- Somewhat ironically, my building's main noise problem (aside from cars) isn't young people with stereos, but an old guy who watches network TV at full volume ... 24 hours a day. This medium seriously cannot die soon enough.
- One of the ideas for the High Line in New York was to make it a 7,920-foot-long swimming pool.
I’m happy with how it ended up, but what a great concept!http://www.thehighline.org/media/W1siZiIsIjIwMTUvM…- RT @interfluidity: American politics now boils down to a contest over who can describe sets of events in the most nefariously conspiratoria…
- The best kind of new feature — a common (and critical) database operation gets much better, and users don't have to do a thing. The little Oracle <-> Postgres disparity that's left continues to shrink every year.
Congrats @petervgeoghegan! https://twitter.com/petervgeoghegan/status/9595127…- There's been a grace period of 10 years since the TLS 1.2 spec was published, and the time has come to make sure you're upgraded.
(PCI providers need to start shedding requests come June to stay compliant, so it's for real this time.)January
- EDB’s building a new table storage backend in Postgres that uses a technique akin to Oracle’s undo log for MVCC (named “zheap”). No more table float or stalled VACUUMs. Fascinating. http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2018/01/do-or-undo-there…
- A fun aspect of production scale is that you don’t just hit your edge cases, you hit them often enough that they’re reliably reproducible.
- The Dark Forest is even more interesting than its prequel — I’m still thinking about its ideas whenever I look up at a night sky.
(It’s also really nice to see hard science-fiction bubble to the top of the popular culture every once in a while.) https://t.co/v9kmwITDtb- The story of why we don’t build powerful tooling for humans is told by common escalators.
Used correctly, they convey superhuman ability to climb stairs at double speed. In reality, people stand on them. Getting between floors is half as fast, but we can be five times as lazy.- RT @antirez: Blog post: “An update on Redis Streams development”: http://antirez.com/news/116
- The world is really going to suffer deprived of those crappy two minute smartphone videos taken from thirty rows back with no optical zoom that literally no one has rewatched ever.
https://www.spin.com/2018/01/jack-white-bans-phone…- Saw a service go down yesterday. Likely cause was an upgrade in minor version of one gem made it incompatible with another gem that was patching its internal API.
There’s an argument for “responsible” Ruby, but a programming language that lets this happen is not a good one.- RT @postgresql: Curious how atomicity happens in Postgres? @brandur explains it for you here - https://brandur.org/postgres-atomicity
- Stunning photography of Chinese aquaculture. I'm sure those waterscapes have a healthy dose of inherent beauty, but the composition on these shots is pure genius; huge credit to the photographer (Tugo Cheng).
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2…- Recently got access to Safari, and was baffled to find that O'Reilly has eliminated downloadable formats for its books — it's hard to imagine a more hostile (distracting, poor ergonomics, etc.) reading environment than a web browser on a laptop.
- I got one comment on HN today (intended unironically, but ironic at the meta level) explaining that it's wrong to be complimentary of Go because Turbo Pascal on DOS did it sooner, better.
My mistake. By way of apology, I've attached some beautiful Pascal syntax for admiration. https://t.co/yi8CkXd2za- Go on Lambda is *really* compelling. It's fast, highly concurrent, is batteries included, but its most interesting features for serverless might be API stability and easy, robust deployments. A few more words on the subject:
https://brandur.org/go-lambda- After yesterday's events, I'm trying my first Twitter poll (even if I don't think the end is quite nigh).
What will the end of cryptomania look like?- I'd missed that HHVM has permanently and irreparably fractured from PHP.
Maybe it's just me, but supporting a custom PHP-like lang/VM forever, ~alone, is such a morose idea, even if you're Facebook. OSS is good. Shared community effort is even better.https://hhvm.com/blog/2017/09/18/the-future-of-hhv…- It makes you think about language trade offs. Is a ~1% runtime performance penalty acceptable in return for a 10-100x improvement in devtime ergonomics?
The Rust philosophy would be “no”, but the more pragmatic answer (and embodied by the likes of Go and Swift) is “yes”.- Random thoughts on Rust:
So much is amazing, but my god, I spent two hours today trying to figure out how to make a trait imply cloneable (and failed — see E0038). This is pretty normal, with huge swaths of time getting sunk into problems that are appallingly uninteresting.- Great to see Google writing in support of strongly consistent databases. Building on transaction-less databases (Mongo, etc.) is a great way to spend eternity desperately shoring up brittle code against a trillion edge cases caused by concurrent access.
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/01/why-y…- If you thought Go's `close(chan)` was cool:
(Rust) A control thread injects work and workers receive it by channel. Control waits for them to join after it finishes sending work and the channel closes automatically (and safely) as it `Drop`s from scope.https://github.com/brandur/podcore/blob/c491aa24c9…- I just added another two years to my Nautilus subscription. I don't know of another magazine published with such consistently good and innovative content, and the print and PDF editions beautifully built — a project well worth supporting.
http://nautil.us/- The design document for Redis' upcoming consumer groups is well worth the read. A complicated feature implemented in understandable terms.
https://gist.github.com/antirez/68e67f3251d10f0268…- Love the shift in San Francisco’s usual sterile California weather. Just a little eerie and the most perfect temperature possible for running/walking.
(Pictured: Salesforce Tower and the Financial District from Tank Hill.) https://t.co/plQKPi2D3P- RT @postgresql: An example of building an idempotent API utilizing keys with @postgresql by @brandur
https://brandur.org/idempotency-keys- RT @Benoit_Tgt: (..) distinction between “simple” and “easy”: simplicity meaning the opposite of complex, and ease meaning “to be at hand”…
- The best, totally unexpected improvement to smartphones over the last few years is their waterproofness. It’s nice being able to run in the rain minus the ziplock bag. https://t.co/wHYrhl2Uer
- The idea that "programming language doesn't matter" is popular, but experience will show engineers leveraging tools like Rust producing software an order of magnitude+ more reliable than on entropic alternatives like JS/Python/Ruby.
(Unfortunately, it'll be hard to prove.)- A week and a half into daily Rust programming:
Every line is a new death struggle with the compiler, but once that's done, you're done — the runtime confidence is freeing, even compared to other compiled languages like C#/C++/Go (Haskell is comparable, but less sane).2017
December
- The iPhone X’s ultra-wide aspect ratio isn’t so good for 3:2 photos anymore, but with it + AirPods (+ a lot of help from Plex) Apple’s accidentally created the best mobile home theatre setup of all time. Very close to flawless. https://t.co/qsTZu8zjgK
- The icy Bow.(Calgary, hovering between -25C and -33C, has reached a special kind of cold.) https://t.co/UvvvCr1Szb
- (Also, I've sunk so many hours into Rust this holiday season that its error messages around moves/borrows/lifetimes are actually starting to make sense. God help me.)
- Rust's `slog` is the most elegant logging I've ever seen: Its "compact" format will show structured log lines in a hierarchy so that you can actually read them. A few tiny helpers of your own keeps invocation succinct and clean. An async drain ensures perf.
Totally beautiful. https://t.co/DZuHBmYRYy- Here's Rust/Diesel's type system preventing me from loading a `BIGINT` into an `i32` (it needs an i64) at compile time. A little annoyance today to prevent horrific bugs tomorrow. https://t.co/gQZd8D2vwu
- Hit 100 days on Headspace and now changing to new(ish) Oak meditation app.
Excellent so far — especially the configurable background noise. You’re not always in a quiet environment, and ambient noise can be a big help for focus. https://t.co/HQ3NhPebr9- Mongo zealot on HN: “It’s nice that Postgres supports JSON, but I’d like to see it come with a custom, non-standard form of JSON with timestamps like Mongo’s BSON.”
I’ll explain the concept of data types and typed schemas right after I’m through explaining the concept of irony.- GitHub's approach of providing few, powerful features that are extensible is much better than carpet bombing 1,000 non-distinct ones, 98% of which are left unused (JIRA).
Better for big projects, _way_ better for small and medium-sized projects.- Always impressed looking at the Kubernetes tag/CI/bot setup. https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pulls
Especially the tags.- "Atomic Blonde" won't be remembered for its depth, but anything that takes place in Berlin with an 80s soundtrack this extensive is at the very least fun to watch. https://t.co/WFYo6QaID3
- Excellent piece on Tokio, Mio, futures, and tasks in Rust. Great detail and great depth. I didn't understand it all the first time around so I'm reading it again.
https://cafbit.com/post/tokio_internals/- I was loving the iPhone's "raise to wake" feature until I tried running with it. Combined with the engorged power button, you're waking it up by accident once every ~5 seconds.
120,000+ employees at Apple and no one jogs?- Two recent LED acquistions. 7W and 36W respectively; both roughly as bright as the sun.
Flying cars, a moon base, and world peace have been frustratingly elusive, but the future has yielded amazing lighting technology beyond what anyone could have dreamt even as late as the 80s. https://t.co/j1MtONmLos- The Starry Expanse is rebuilding Riven from scratch and making it fully 3D this time around. The project’s been in progress since 2010 already. What a heroic effort.
http://www.starryexpanse.com- I ran my first deploy to Amazon's Fargate — it worked, but I'd been hoping for something ... simpler.
Despite Docker, containers, and Kubernetes, the world is still looking for a deployment and operational experience on par with Heroku in mid-2011. There's lots of room to grow.
- RT @dcurtis: In order of importance for San Francisco government—possibly the worst major city government in the country—to address:
