Blain Smith
Blain Smith
Blain Smith
A personal blog mostly about tech and some of the frustrations with it, but there is some technical goodies.
Latest Posts
There's a particular kind of engineer I've been noticing more and more lately. They show up in Slack channels with half-formed questions. They post screenshots of error messages on Twitter asking "anyone know what this means?" They...
I am surprised I haven't written this sooner, especially since I have written about How I Write HTTP Clients. It was inevitable this post was going to be written. With that said, I want this post to follow the same format so a lot of...
There's been a recurring thought I've been having as I've gotten older and I'm coming up on being in tech for 30 years. Granted, that would make me 14 when I started, but yes, I was that young when I realized I wanted to make this my...
2025-10-20 Squat: 6 @ 390# (RPE 6) 6 @ 405# (RPE 7) 6 @ 420# (RPE 8) RDL: 8 @ 375# (RPE 6) 8 @ 390# (RPE 7) 8 @ 405# (RPE 8) Split Squat: 10 @ 75# (RPE 6) 10 @ 85# (RPE 7) 10 @ 95# (RPE 8) Calf Raises: 15 @ 95# (RPE 6) 15 @ 100# (RPE 7)...
2025-10-13 Squat: 8 @ 375# (RPE 7) 8 @ 390# (RPE 8) 8 @ 405# (RPE 9) Shoulder Press: 8 @ 140# (RPE 7) 8 @ 145# (RPE 8) 8 @ 150# (RPE 9) Wide Grip Bench 10 @ 195# (70% of 1RM) 2x12 @ 175# (63% of 1RM) DB Lateral Raises 3x12 @ 25#...
Does this happen to you? Someone shows you something they built. You look at it carefully, think through the implications, and give specific, considered feedback. They walk away deflated. Later, someone tells you that you "seemed...
It had occurred to me that I haven't really solidified my position on coding with "AI" so I thought I would jot down some thoughts on the subject. Come to think of it... It's the exact opposite of... Hmmm... Wait, I already have written...
I don't sit down to design systems with complexity as the point. But I've met some that engineers do. They'll never say it outright, but you can see it in their work. They write layers on top of layers, abstractions stacked on...
As a software engineer who's been through the cycle of tooling bloat and complexity creep, I've come full circle to embrace radical simplicity. After years of wrestling with heavyweight IDEs, managing dozens of extensions, and debugging...
There's something quietly dignified about a clean commit history, well written patch/pull requests, and documentation. It tells you someone gave a damn. That they weren't just slinging code to pass tests, but writing with others,...
I’ve been writing code for about thirty years now. I say that with no small amount of gratitude and a touch of disbelief. Thirty years of debugging, designing, deleting, rewriting. Of shipping things that broke and patching things that...
Whenever someone asks me about learning Go and what online resources I would recommend they check out I always point them to Go by Example. This quick reference style site lets someone who is already good at programming in another...
Recently, Adële wrote about how to block non-human crawlers by setting a cookie to prove a human is visiting a website. I won't go into details here about how the mechanics work, but I wanted to see if I could adapt this to Go middleware...
This past January 13th I turned 43, and as I approached that day, I spent a lot of time over winter break reflecting on the past decades I worked in the tech industry. About a year ago I had a similar reflection when I rage-quit, but I...
I have been involved in writing software professionally for almost 3 decades. A lot has changed since the days of <font> tags and cgi-bin scripts. A lot of the changes have redefined how software is written, organized, collaborated on,...