Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
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
Axel Magnuson shares techniques for abstraction in Zig, comparing comptime duck typing and interfaces with vtables against a trait pattern inspired by OCaml modules, then building trait helpers and trait functors on top of it.
18 min · 4,073 words
The Double Headed Stack Allocator
A game-programming write-up on stack (bump) allocators, starting from animation blending on Midway's cancelled This is Vegas, then extending the idea to a double-headed stack allocator that grows from both ends of one buffer, and a scheme for storing variable-sized objects in a finite region with an offset table.
7 min · 1,696 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
The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME
A short warning that writing export PATH="$PATH:~/.local/bin/" in a shell rc file leaves a literal tilde in PATH because tilde expansion only happens in unquoted words, which can let sandboxed tools write to unexpected directories; it shows how to check for and fix it with $HOME.
2 min · 373 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
Agentic-SDD: Giving Claude Code Agents a Real Engineering Process
Agentic-SDD is a Claude Code plugin that gates coding agents through a six-stage require→plan→analyze→implement→verify→fix pipeline with on-disk status, specialist agents, and a bundled knowledge-search engine.
6 min · 1,303 words
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
What Makes LLM Tokenization Slow?Exploring the performance of byte-pair encoding by optimizing a GPT-2 tokenizer.
Andrew Healey dissects GPT-2’s reference BPE tokenizer, measures what makes tokenization slow, and shows concrete optimizations on the hot path of LLM products.
11 min · 2,547 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
Driving the GDEH0154D67 e-paper display with Rust
Hands-on Rust notes for driving a GDEH0154D67 e-paper panel—starting from a Watchy/ESP32 hack project, covering the display protocol, refresh quirks, and a working driver approach.
9 min · 2,066 words
Blogging with Gleam, Org-Mode and Pandoc
A practical pipeline for keeping writing inside Emacs while publishing with Gleam, Org-mode, and Pandoc—why the composition stays in the editor and how the static site pieces fit together.
7 min · 1,708 words
Anatomy of a Lean Proof for Software Engineers
A walkthrough of formalizing a theory-of-computation style finite-automata proof in Lean, showing software engineers what Mathlib proofs look like structure-by-structure—from informal constructive argument to machine-checked theorem.
55 min · 12,670 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
Engineer-Led, AI-Assisted: A Practical Workflow for Building Software
Nathan Pickard describes an engineer-led, AI-assisted software workflow covering planning, development, testing, code review, and context management—arguing AI depends on engineering judgment rather than replacing it.
20 min · 4,529 words
C++26: the new debugging header
Sandor Dargo explains C++26's new <debugging> header from P2546R5 and P2810R4, which standardizes what projects like Boost.Test, Catch2, Dear ImGui and Unreal each reinvented: std::breakpoint, std::is_debugger_present and std::breakpoint_if_debugging, replacing platform-specific breakpoint macros.
2 min · 559 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