Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
How we built demo.usenotra.com
Notra founding engineer Jan Burzinski explains how every visitor to demo.usenotra.com gets an isolated workspace in about 0.4 seconds without signing up—using signed cookies, a Postgres sandbox pool, and a fake model—so people can try the product immediately.
8 min · 1,924 words
Tetris in d dimensions: how we rightsize Kubernetes nodes
Emmanuel Bakare explains how CostGraph rightsizes Kubernetes nodes as a vector bin packing problem: sizing pods from real usage percentiles, checking placements against scheduler hard constraints, and using Dot Product and L2 heuristics from Panigrahy et al. instead of first fit decreasing.
12 min · 2,675 words
Speeding up the Unreal editor by… not using unnecessarily secure hash methods
A profiling write-up finding that Unreal Engine's editor launch hashes full shader source files with cryptographically secure SHA-1, and how switching to the engine's existing xxHash implementation sped this up, plus notes on preparing the change as a pull request.
4 min · 986 words
Migrating a banking app from AngularJS to Web Components
Marius Vatasoiu recounts the six-plus-year migration of ING Bank Romania's feature-rich banking app from AngularJS to Web Components with Lit, done incrementally without impacting clients, and the lessons learned about architecture, routing and working through framework abstractions.
12 min · 2,858 words
When ldaxr Doesn't Work: Exclusive Accesses and Cacheability on AArch64
Joel Siks debugs why spinlocks built on ldaxr/stxr exclusive accesses hung on a real Raspberry Pi 5 while working in QEMU in his hobby AArch64 kernel floss, tracing it to memory cacheability attributes and the differences between QEMU, the Arm architecture manual and the Cortex-A76.
12 min · 2,658 words
We gave init() developers an ESP32-S3 computer as a conference badge. They put DOOM on it.
WorkOS shipped ESP32-S3 computers as init() 2026 conference badges; attendees put DOOM, Tamagotchi, voice assistants, and flight trackers on them. A recap of the badge hardware and what ~500 people built.
5 min · 1,195 words
A green exit code is not evidence that the work happened
Why agent-run jobs that exit 0 can still have done nothing—and how to assert on real work products and alert on silent zero-effect “success.”
10 min · 2,257 words
Production-grade LLMs and agents: a field guide
Stack Overflow’s maturity map for taking LLM agents from demos to production: determinism, evaluation, confidence, safety, operability, and disciplined coding-agent builds.
3 min · 704 words
OTel-Native by Design: Building Products That Export to Any Observability Stack
An OpenTelemetry blog guide for SaaS and self-hosted product builders on letting customers export logs, traces, metrics and profiles over OTLP to any OpenTelemetry-compatible backend instead of locking them into built-in dashboards or specific vendors.
14 min · 3,135 words
Making a flexible “neon” t-shirt with LED filaments
Earlier this year I had the perfect excuse to experiment with some flexible LED filaments that had been sitting in my “interesting parts” bin for years -- the company I work for was putting on a neon-themed event, so obviously I had to custom-build some LED neon attire! The only problem was this was announced less than a week in advance.... This is how I designed and assembled a wearable neon shirt in just a few days.
3 min · 741 words
Looking back at more than 5 years at Shopify
Matt Burnett reflects on nearly five and a half years as an engineer at Shopify—the products he helped ship and then forgot, the people, and the odd disbelief of having ended up there—after leaving in August 2026.
8 min · 1,769 words
Daniel Mangum digs into the Nordic nRF54LM20 access port and what you can learn when a peripheral writes memory while the CPU is halted.
9 min · 1,960 words
Scaling and benchmarking a critical message bus using a new indexing strategy
Jane Street describes a summer intern project on Aria, its internal messaging framework: indexing the in-memory stream tip and adaptively splitting the topic tree so clients can cheaply recover just the messages they need, cutting CPU usage by about 30% on production-like workloads.
9 min · 2,000 words
An essay comparing commodity and engineering plastics to literary character types—why “polymer” is often marketing spin, and how chemistry shapes toughness, clarity, heat tolerance, and reputation.
7 min · 1,565 words
Against All Odds describes PasRISCV, the custom RISC-V emulator that runs a full Linux userspace inside their game SEEDS so in-game tools can execute as native ELF binaries even on Windows hosts.
7 min · 1,664 words
Why It's Time to Rename Cybersecurity Awareness Month
Semgrep makes the case for renaming Cybersecurity Awareness Month to focus less on catchy campaigns and more on measurable secure-by-default engineering practices that actually reduce risk.
6 min · 1,311 words
How Firestore Matches Realtime Queries
Tyler Rockwood explains how Cloud Firestore matches and fans out realtime listeners efficiently as documents change—covering query indexing, target matching, and fanout tradeoffs.
5 min · 1,243 words
Docker has always used microVMs
Dave Scott revisits Docker’s history and argues containers on Linux have long leaned on microVM-style isolation ideas—context for today’s secure sandbox and unikernel discussions.
2 min · 373 words
What shipped at Buildkite: September 27 – October 3, 2026
Buildkite's weekly product wrap: pipeline secrets, MCP server v1.24, agent v4.1.0, GitHub Actions arm64 support, shared test pools, and other shipping notes from late September into early October 2026.
7 min · 1,585 words
Quick thoughts on GitHub’s Sept 23 incident
Lorin Hochstein reads GitHub's terse write-up of its Sept 23 Azure Central US database incident and pulls out the multiple contributing factors hiding in it: planned maintenance, replica failover, and an under-capacity primary.
3 min · 696 words