Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Using docker-compose with Podman rootless
Elouan Martinet explains how to run docker-compose against rootless Podman by enabling its Docker-compatible user socket and setting DOCKER_HOST, with tips on disabling rootful Docker, podman unshare and podman mount, rootless Docker, and user lingering so containers survive logout.
3 min · 657 words
Cache-Aware Programming: How Software Learns to Work With the Hardware
A practical essay on why memory access patterns often dominate runtime: caches, locality, and how programming choices make software cooperate with modern hardware.
6 min · 1,473 words
John Benediktsson's code-forward tour of the Factor stack-based language for programmers new to concatenative languages, covering the stack, word definitions, quotations and combinators, sequences, tuples, generic words, vocabularies, errors and resource cleanup, macros, and common libraries such as JSON, regex, and HTTP.
21 min · 4,819 words
Building a Job Queue in Postgres with SKIP LOCKED
Michael Guay walks through running background jobs in Postgres instead of Redis: the jobs table, claiming work safely with SKIP LOCKED, leases for crashed workers, retries with backoff, dedup, LISTEN/NOTIFY wakeups, and when not to.
9 min · 2,138 words
Go JSON v2 Migration: What Breaks in Go 1.27
Side-by-side notes on migrating to Go 1.27 encoding/json/v2: which outputs change versus v1 and which options or struct tags restore expected behavior.
10 min · 2,246 words
Self-hosted HTTP tunnels with SSH and nginx
Vincent Bernat shows how to expose a localhost preview to a friend with only a plain SSH client and an nginx server you control: ssh -R with a dynamic port, an nginx server_name regex mapping per-port subdomains, wildcard TLS via ACME DNS-01, and a helper script plus NixOS module.
4 min · 998 words
Jane Street reveals what its August ASIC reverse-engineering puzzle chip actually did, how solvers approached the GDS layout without a netlist, and lessons from the physical-design challenge.
10 min · 2,405 words
A Minsky machine in ncurses terminfo
Nicolas Seriot shows how ncurses terminfo parameter expansion can simulate a 2-counter Minsky machine—hosting a Fibonacci program in your terminal, clocked by /usr/bin/top.
5 min · 1,222 words
Back in June of 2024 at RustFest Zürich, the Const Generics project group first discussed a new design for supporting more complex uses of generic parameters in Const Generics. Since then, we've continued to refine the initial design and have implemented the new design as a family of features dubbed "Generic Const Arguments" (GCA for short).
11 min · 2,501 words
Spring AI Modular RAG and TypeSafe Jev: Retrieve More, Keep Only What Answers
Christian Tzolov walks through Spring AI modular RAG plus TypeSafe Jev: rewrite/expand the query before retrieval, then keep only chunks that actually answer—contrasting naive QuestionAnswerAdvisor RAG with a live demo pipeline.
6 min · 1,487 words
I let an AI agent run my side project's growth loop: intent.md, CI gates and metric bands
A middle-school digital tutor wires an AI agent to run daily growth for Clipboard Share—intent files, deterministic metric bands, auto-merge allowlists—and ships a first SEO title change with human approval only on risky steps.
6 min · 1,356 wordsagent-assisted
Ambient agents respond to events such as an Amazon S3 upload, a schedule, or an alert instead of waiting for a chat prompt. This post walks through building framework-agnostic ambient agents on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore using Amazon SQS, AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB, with a single ask_human tool and a Jobs page for human-in-the-loop review.
24 min · 5,504 words
A Visual Intro to Complex Numbers
A visual, intuition-first tutorial on complex numbers: starting from an unsolvable system of equations, it builds up the imaginary unit as a 90-degree rotation, the complex plane, multiplication as rotation and scaling, Euler’s formula, and applications in AC circuits, signals, control and MRI.
16 min · 3,760 words
Document Review With Unsiloed and TypeSafe Jev
Unsiloed AI and TypeSafe’s Jev show a document-review pipeline that pairs extraction with schema-validated checks so OCR-correct but semantically wrong values (like an extra zero) are caught before they flow downstream.
6 min · 1,330 words
Functional ultrasound imaging from scratch
Functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI) is a brain imaging modality that is just starting to be demonstrated in human studies. I’m sure many will be familiar with structural ultrasound imaging, which forms static images using ultrasound, as in a sonogram1. Functional ultrasound instead captures movies of brain tissue very rapidly, tracking subtle changes caused by the blood flow that follows neural activity.
11 min · 2,451 words
A Spring AI tutorial on hardening agents for production: guardrails, evaluation loops, observability, tool authorization, and human-in-the-loop approval beyond a basic MCP-connected demo.
17 min · 3,953 words
Readable Regular Expressions for JavaScript/TypeScript, Inspired by Emacs' rx
A tutorial bringing Emacs-style rx composable regex DSLs to JavaScript and TypeScript so complex patterns stay readable and maintainable.
18 min · 4,193 words
Reverse Engineering NovaLogic's Comanche Terrain Maps
A detailed reverse-engineering walkthrough of Comanche: Maximum Overkill MS-DOS terrain/map files—how NovaLogic packed heightmaps and related data, and how to reconstruct the landscapes.
16 min · 3,693 words
How to Build a Reliable AI Assistant with the Claude API
A freeCodeCamp tutorial building ShopHelper with the Claude API: conversation history, tools, multi-block responses, workflow patterns, and evaluating whether prompt changes actually help.
9 min · 2,132 words
Using any C++ library in Godot
Using any C++ library in Godot Godot has become one of the most popular game engines of the last few years. It is free, open source under the MIT license, and small enough to download and start using in minutes.
10 min · 2,353 words