Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
I can't believe PowerShell is actually good
Corbin Davenport of The Spacebar admits he underestimated PowerShell after Bash scripting frustrations, showing how its native data types, easy web API parsing, and .NET objects made a real scripting job, migrating old Tumblr posts with their metadata, far easier.
10 min · 2,286 words
Cloudflare is rewriting everything in Rust
Sylvain Kerkour traces Cloudflare's shift from C and Lua NGINX modules to Rust after CloudBleed, covering Pingora, FL2 and the NGINX termination rewrite, a critique of its open-source posture, and how avoiding .unwrap() could have prevented the November 18, 2025 outage.
5 min · 1,102 words
Using a lookup-table to correct an approximation
A corsix.org post on compiling enum-to-string functions compactly: instead of a switch or a full offset table, compute a fast but incorrect approximation of each string's offset and fix it with a small table of corrections, a general trick compilers still miss.
4 min · 827 words
Max Bernstein on Rails at Scale shows how Rails enum predicate methods were made dramatically faster by generating static code at runtime instead of dynamic public_send dispatch, with benchmarks and lessons about fixing performance upstream.
3 min · 788 words
Don't throw it all away: Caching an immediate-mode UI
How Blick's UI Painter keeps pixels it has already rendered, combines shapes and opacity groups, and saves work behind an immediate-mode UI, with measurements of CPU, GPU, and battery impact.
17 min · 3,914 words
The Quake Fan who built the map editor everybody uses
func_arena interviews Kristian Duske, creator of the TrenchBroom Quake level editor, about starting it in 2010 as a Mac user, rewrites from Objective-C to C++, the move from wxWidgets to Qt, a stubborn CSG algorithm, and how he maintains a widely used open-source project alongside a full-time job - despite never making another map.
10 min · 2,295 words
Aaron Allen's 'Hanami, Why?' series covers Hanami's database layer: why it splits persistence into relations, repos and structs instead of Rails-style models, the advantages of the repo pattern, keeping persistence from leaking into the rest of an app, and the rough edges he has found so far.
11 min · 2,581 words
Making dns_erlang Fast: Binary Tricks for the BEAM
Nelson Vides of DNSimple explains how binary pattern matching, append-friendly accumulators, staying in the match context, chunked matching and SWAR cut CPU per query in their Erlang name server erldns by 12%, what didn't work, and lessons for any BEAM application.
17 min · 3,980 words
Superlite: hand an agent a spec, come back to tested work
Context First introduces Superlite, a lighter alternative to Superpowers-style agent workflows: hand an agent a clear spec and return to tested work rather than babysitting every step.
10 min · 2,244 words
Dynamic Packages for Free Pascal and Lazarus
The getlazarus.org maintainer announces the first release of full dynamic package support for the Free Pascal Compiler and Lazarus IDE, letting components and plugins be built as shared libraries and installed without rebuilding the IDE, and covers restrictions, runtime changes, IDE improvements and how to help.
5 min · 1,157 words
Gavin Anderegg digs into a mysterious /pkg/env/global/bin entry that macOS 27.0 adds to PATH via /etc/paths.d, explaining path_helper background and what is and isn't known about the new root-level /pkg directory.
2 min · 452 words
Why I'm no longer updating this repository
Paul Battley explains why he is archiving all his Ruby gems: Ruby was once designed for programmer joy and for humans, but with Rails controlled by a figure he opposes and Ruby itself now developed and repositioned around LLM agents, he no longer wants to contribute to a commons being strip-mined to feed AI.
2 min · 436 words
The Vermilion Experiment: Implementing a Lean Backend for Verus
Proofs and Intuitions describes the Vermilion experiment: implementing a Lean back end for Verus to explore verified software tooling across proof assistants.
20 min · 4,538 words
A Very Fast IPv4 Parser, in Swift
Mahdi Bahrami presents a new IPv4 parsing algorithm built for swift-endpoint that uses SWAR tricks instead of lookup tables, SIMD or out-of-bounds reads, explains why existing fast parsers' contracts don't fit Swift, and benchmarks it at around 3 nanoseconds, ranking second on Apple M6 and third on AMD Zen 5.
14 min · 3,226 words
The Problem with C++ Safety (Part 1): Why “It Works” Isn’t Good Enough
Klaus Iglberger, writing on Rainer Grimm's Modernes C++ blog, argues that C++ code that 'works' is not the same as memory-safe code, introducing why informal testing is a weak safety argument and what stronger reasoning looks like.
9 min · 2,085 words
A New Way to Think About Borrow Checking (In Reverse)
Evan Ovadia explains how the Valen programming language's borrow checker walks functions backwards, in reverse control-flow order, so it already knows how references will be used later, walking through its static typing, static grouping and safety-checking phases, loops, and how the design compares with Rust's borrow checker.
15 min · 3,517 words
The History of Development of Norton Commander
Dr Nikolai Bezroukov's Softpanorama chapter recounts how John Socha's Norton Commander defined the Orthodox File Manager paradigm—from VDOS and NC 1.0 in 1986 through the cult of NC 3.0 to NC 5.5—and why the dual-pane OFM design still shapes file managers decades later.
81 min · 18,563 words
Jim Calabro walks through how bloom filters work, how Bluesky moved from multiple hash functions to double hashing to cut contention, and then explores the one-hash bloom filter from Lu et al., which splits the bit array into partitions with pairwise coprime sizes so a single hash can stand in for k independent ones.
6 min · 1,387 words
It's still OK to enjoy programming
Chris Kiehl pushes back on the doom about AI and programming: work economics may have changed, but programming for fun on weekends, from a buggy Breakout clone to Agda-style type tricks in Java and recursion schemes, needs no economic justification, and the pressure not to enjoy it fades once you disconnect.
2 min · 472 words
Using timers to perform weekly tasks
Marcin Borkowski shows how he runs a weekly Org-mode review with Emacs timers, including sleep-aware scheduling with system-sleep so the review still fires after the machine wakes.
7 min · 1,588 words