Weeknotes 20

Engineering

• Fast Servers. A new pattern for writing network servers which addresses the shortcomings of all the existing servers.
• The binary search of distributed programming | Antirez. A simple to understand algorithm for generating monotonically increasing IDs in a distributed system. The author (who created Redis) likens this to binary search and hopes that this will give beginners to distributed systems an aha moment, like CS students get when they look at binary search.
• Paul Ford: What Is Code? | Bloomberg. A great, funny read about software development. I will recommend that all software engineers show it to their partners. I think it will help them understand our job better.

GenAI

• LLMs bring new nature of abstraction. This talks about how LLMs introduce a new type of abstraction, which is both low level and high level.
• How is GenAI different from other code generators? This post is the origin of the above insight.

Career

• Publishing your work increases your luck | GitHub. A good argument for why you should show your work to the world. This is one of the reasons why I have this blog.

Tools

• Wuffs: Wrangling Untrusted File Formats Safely.
• Entire. Entire CLI hooks into your git workflow to capture AI agent sessions on every push. Sessions are indexed alongside commits, a searchable record of how code was written.