1,840 tweets, and 3,740 including replies.
2018
June
- Interesting thread on whether people are deploying anything important on serverless.Reading between the lines, I suspect that if there were a lot of large serverless deployments out there, we'd be seeing many more data points, and more notable ones too.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17378749
- I finished my third Haruki Murakami book ("A Wild Sheep Chase") of the last couple years, and his brand of weird surrealism continues to delight.
I'm still thinking about "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" months after finishing it — surely the sign of a great book.- Submissions for National Geographic's Travel Photographer of the Year contest is a never-ending carousel of the most incredible photography you'll ever see — on everything from the most pristine nature to the densest urban environments. Here's 2018.
http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/photographer-…- RT @rauchg: PR that adds async/await to Rust
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/51580- I tried to tell a story last night about camping out near a decommissioned nuclear reactor over the weekend, but no one at the table was event remotely impressed – apparently half of America grew up within spitting distance of one.
Still, I thought it was cool. https://t.co/qWu7DoWfQq- Even while REST is perfectly adequate as a modest baseline, I put together a few words on why I think GraphQL has the promise to lead to a generation of APIs that are more powerful, more discoverable, and most importantly, more adaptable.
https://brandur.org/graphql- This might be different if AirBnB was actually more like home sharing, but you see time and time again the rise of "professional" AirBnBs that are rented out (almost) the entirety of the year, and are more common in attractive cities, ~all of which face a constant housing crunch.
- Unpopular opinion: considerable restrictions on AirBnB are probably the right thing. The service is ultimately good for travelers (including me, many times), but *mostly* bad for locals, with the major exception being a wealthy rent-collecting class.
https://www.cntraveler.com/story/nearly-80-percent…- We just released stripe-go v32 — a major overhaul that refines the implementation, fixes a lot of naming, and produces an API that can distinguish between a value that wasn't set from one that's explicitly empty.
Migration guide: https://github.com/stripe/stripe-go/blob/master/v3…- I'll be championing Markdown in Git repositories until the day I die, but wow, Dropbox Paper is a near perfect WYSIWYG implementation —10x better than alternatives.
Tools like this exist, and yet companies pay real money for Confluence. Enterprise software is total madness.- Backyards in San Francisco are on average, more vibrant than most places in the world. A lot of that is climate, but there’s also a dose of tight constraints breeding creativity.
The boring facades you see along a street often don’t give you a feel for the quiet oases out back. https://t.co/9Z9S0IILT6May
- Some legitimate reasons to miss San Francisco: (1) running up mountains a few blocks from your front door, (2) car-free days in Golden Gate Park. https://t.co/0cOpqz5N7R
- We're about to make a large-ish change to how API parameters are sent in stripe-go so that we handle places where zero values of types are meaningful. I've opened a small RFC, and would be interested in hearing from you if you have an opinion on it.https://github.com/stripe/stripe-go/issues/560
- The KVB at Volkspalast.
Sometimes the venue really helps make a show, and Leipzig is full of big, old, interesting places. Seeing one here is like what it would have felt like to hold a rock concert in an ancient Roman temple (but with a sound system from 2018). https://t.co/C0yaezMTtz- Juniper (Rust GraphQL) just merged a “lookahead” feature making efficient data fetches possible by composing queries based on request introspection.
Calling DataLoader (the usual implementation) just “inelegant” is generous. This looks to be much better.https://github.com/graphql-rust/juniper/issues/124- (And here's a link to a great episode of Hurry Slowly on the benefits of nature on creativity and mental health. I can't endorse this enough.)
http://hurryslowly.co/002-florence-williams/- A favourite part of Leipzig is the abundance of peaceful trails running through largely undeveloped greenery.
This is really close to what an optimal city should look like: dense residential surrounded by lots of natural space. Minimal roads. No parking lots. https://t.co/KZ0xE2NcS7- And serendipitous running exploration find of the day: wild boar (not literally wild).
Not pictured: piglets scurrying around in the background. Boss boar so big that he might know a thing of two about the assassination of Robert Baratheon. https://t.co/fq79Q3Ixr2- The Monument to the Battle of Nations, built on site 100 years after the Battle of Leipzig, Napoleon’s decisive defeat that led to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. It towers over you at 300 feet tall.
(Morning runs here are a little more interesting than home.) https://t.co/KQrPbq8QUo- Somewhat ironically given its content, 1984 sure manages to inspire some tremendously well-designed book covers.
(And imagine how many hundreds of editions of this book have been printed since it was published in ‘49.) https://t.co/gfTfKFSiJy- `impl Trait` lands today in Rust 1.26. Its utility isn't obvious, but what you had to do before (trait objects) was a huge pain while learning.
Between that, Result from main, 128 bit integers, and async/await in sight, Rust stays the most exciting happening in software, by far.- Only the most critical or widespread projects will make meaningful advances after their original authors leave, and only through incredible effort and tenacity by their inheritors after so much context is lost.
Be a good citizen: don't throw half-baked software over the fence.- Some images are powerful enough to pull you away from where you are now and take your mind to a fantastic place far away.
These “Forest of Liars” renderings are some of them. Absolutely gorgeous. https://twitter.com/sylvainsarrailh/status/9938374…- An ingeniously-designed kit for pour-over coffee on the road.
https://design-milk.com/enjoy-next-third-wave-pour…- (I try to find something inspiring to look at in the morning. Here that is in the form of) some gorgeous Swiss mountainscapes.
April
- Compare an efficient keyboardist to a fast phone/tablet user and you’ll see a 10x+ productivity difference, yet the majority of R&D goes into touch UIs, or the exotic frontier.There’s still many advances to be made in interface design, and they’re closer to home than we expect.
- Another month in, I'm finally starting to feel semi-literate in Rust. It's the hardest programming language I've ever learnt, but it pays off.
https://brandur.org/fragments/rust-reflections- A short story about moving a very hot rate limiting stack from a single standalone Redis to a 10-node Redis Cluster. Maybe the smoothest production rollout I've ever seen.
https://brandur.org/redis-cluster- Great talk from @antirez yesterday on Redis streams.
A lot of thought has gone into this feature — not just in algorithmic efficiency, but space efficiency (radix tree + only one bit is used if an item's fields match its predecessor's), usability (consumer groups), and testing.- I find some inspiration in the About page for Offscreen, a magazine with no digital version.
All content online gets mixed together, and the asymptote of its perceived value is zero. 280 characters will be ever more normal as target content length.https://www.offscreenmag.com/about- The fruit of the labor of the Bonsai associations from in and around San Francisco, gathered for the day in Japantown. Happy cherry blossom season! https://t.co/8EGyWBFAiV
- (And actually, let's call that ~6x. Please excuse my pre-coffee math ;)
- Inspiring Rust moment of the day: my test suite takes ~8 s to run. `time` reports "user" as ~46 s.
With `time`, if user > real, you're seeing time spent on multiple cores.If user >> real, you're seeing huge parallelization. My suite, using only Rust's normal tooling, shows 9x. https://t.co/3iOWm9MMj3- 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.
- Another month in, I'm finally starting to feel semi-literate in Rust. It's the hardest programming language I've ever learnt, but it pays off.
- The KVB at Volkspalast.
- I finished my third Haruki Murakami book ("A Wild Sheep Chase") of the last couple years, and his brand of weird surrealism continues to delight.
