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 my development environment more than my actual code, I've distilled my entire...

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, including you, in mind. They knew they were stepping into a shared space, and they...

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 probably should not have seen the light of day. Of staying up way too late for...

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 language get up to speed on the basic semantics and idioms without having to read the...

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 to provide the same result. Middleware This is the configurable 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 eventually came around to doing some contract work to make some money and then...

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, and delivered to its users. As more people came online with the commoditization...

Well, I think I finally hit a breaking point and I am officially done with the bullshit spreading through the "big" tech industry lately and I don't want to be a part of it anymore. I've been doing some sort of tech work for almost 30 years (27 to be exact) at this point and I am only 42 years old. I had my birthday...

Today I get to release the first working version of static-httpd. I have always found value in using an HTTP static file server to serve up some quick sites out of the current working directory. I've even written an article way in the beforetimes about some options to spin up a quick server. Since then there has...

TL;DR Read the source code for https://git.sr.ht/~blainsmith/hare-bitcask. I have been writing modules for Hare for a while now. It has been a lot of fun to write and helping expand the open source ecosystem of modules for this language has made me feel very fulfilled. Up until this point I've been mostly focused on...

When building new services, gRPC can be very handy to not only define those services, but also generate a lot of the boilerplate code for server implementations and client libraries. We get the added benefit of a more efficient wire protocol, Protocol Buffers, because it's in binary and a lot smaller than JSON....

I've been reading Drew Devault's blog for quite some time. Recently, he and a small team released a new programming language called Hare that is laser focused on systems programming and meant to compete with C, Rust, Zig, but have some of the simple design choices of Go. The biggest differences from Go I can see is...