Interesting Links

My Quarterly System Health Check-in: Beyond The Dashboard - nilenso blog

Srihari Srirama...

Pure and impure software engineering

Why do solo game developers tend to get into fights with big tech engineers? Why do high-profile external hires to large companies often fizzle out? Why is AI…

How to Fix Your Context

6 tactics for fixing your context and shipping better agents. As Karpathy says, building LLM-powered apps means learning to β€˜pack the context windows just right’—smartly deploying tools, managing information, and maintaining context hygiene.

Deadlock-free Mutexes and Directed Acyclic Graphs

If you need to ensure that a particular piece of data is only ever modified by one thread at once, you need a mutex. If you need more than one mutex, you need to be wary of deadlocks. But what if I told you that there’s a trick to avoid ever reaching a deadlock at all? Just acquire them in the right order!

Lock Contention

Recently, I revisited Resolving a year-long ClickHouse lock contention post and spoke about it at C++ Russia 2025 conference.

A Guide to Undefined Behavior in C and C++, Part 1 – Embedded in Academia

Programming languages typically make a distinction between normal program actions and erroneous actions. For Turing-complete languages we cannot reliably decide offline whether a program has the potential to execute an error; we have to just run it and see.

The Staff+ Performance Cliff

When Staff+ engineers transition from a team lead to an org-level lead, the increased ambiguity often leads to feeling lost and overwhelmed. This article explores the "Performance Cliff" phenomenon and offers practical strategies to adapt, stay organized, and redefine success in a leadership role.

GitHub - Hawzen/hdp: What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?

What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?

GitHub - cordx56/rustowl: Visualize Ownership and Lifetimes in Rust

Visualize Ownership and Lifetimes in Rust. Contribute to cordx56/rustowl development by creating an account on GitHub.

Algebraic effects are a functional approach to manage side effects

An explanation of what algebraic effects are and why they are useful for managing side effects

Trying out Python packages with ipython and uvx

I figured out a really simple pattern for experimenting with new Python packages today:

Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

tl;dr: yes, although I found an approach without ZWJ. In fact, you can encode data in any unicode character. This sentence has a hidden messageσ …Ÿσ …˜σ „σ …σ …©σ „œσ „σ …©σ …Ÿσ …₯σ „σ …–σ …Ÿσ …₯σ …žσ …”σ „σ …€σ …˜σ …•σ „σ …˜σ …™σ …”σ …”σ …•σ …žσ „σ …σ …•σ …£σ …£σ …‘σ …—σ …•σ „σ …™σ …žσ „σ …€σ …˜σ …•σ „σ …€σ …•σ …¨σ …€σ „‘. (Try pasting it into this decoder)

Perma Tools

Experiments and Tailored Tooling for High Fidelity Web Archives.

Jujutsu VCS Introduction and Patterns

Jujutsu (jj), a new version control system written in Rust, has popped up on my radar a few times over the past year. Looked interesting based on a cursory look, but being actually pretty satisfied with Git, and not having major problems with it, I haven’t checked it out. That is, until last week, when I finally decided to give it a go! I dived into a couple blog posts for a few of hours, and surprisingly (noting that we’re talking about a VCS) I found myself enjoying it a lot, seeing the consistent design, and overall simplicity it managed to achieve.

Why Trees Without Branches Grow Faster: The Case for Reducing Branches in Code

CedarDB is a relational-first database that supports all your workloads, from transactional to analytical to graph, accessible through PostgreSQL's tools and SQL dialect.