Benjamin Boudreau

SAML: A fractal of bad design

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 23:41:29 +0000

My thoughts

Amazing look at SAML history, how it came to be, and it’s vulnerabilities!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49806335

Read the article: SAML: A fractal of bad design

Tokens, Please!

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:19:47 +0000

My thoughts

Great way to explain workload identity!

Read the article: Tokens, Please!

Coding on Paper

Sun, 17 May 2026 10:35:25 +0000

Comment

Coding an a e-ink monitor!

The Second Wave of the API-first Economy

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 22:40:36 +0000

Comment

Interesting side effects of AI agents.

Claude code skill creator skill

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 01:46:02 +0000

My thoughts

colonCapitalDee on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47041192 :

I have a custom skill-creator skill that contains this:

A common pitfall is for Claude to create skills and fill them up with generated information about how to complete a task. The problem with this is that the generated content is all content that’s already inside Claude’s probability space. Claude is effectively telling itself information that it already knows!

Instead, Claude should strive to document in SKILL.md only information that:

Pi: The Minimal Agent Within OpenClaw

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 17:22:01 +0000

Comment

Another great take on the PI coder agent

What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 16:52:49 +0000

Comment

A great pragmatic look at coding agents, and PI

I made a simple agent for PR reviews. Don't use it.

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 15:18:18 +0000

Comment

Funny. But also shows how simple it can be to create an PR review agent.

Just talk to it – A way of agentic engineering

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 17:22:52 +0000

Comment

Opinionated agentic coding workflow.

Anecdotal but covering lots of tools and comparing codex and Claude code.

A modern approach to preventing CSRF in Go

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 17:15:52 +0000

Comment

An amazing read!

Additionally the original proposal of the feature https://github.com/golang/go/issues/73626 has a lot of context, examples and explanation.

Use a separate domain for user content

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:06:29 +0000

Comment

Good reminder of the https://publicsuffix.org/ list.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45538760

UUIDv47: Store UUIDv7 in DB, emit UUIDv4 outside (SipHash-masked timestamp)

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 23:47:52 +0000

Comment

Interesting approach and good discussion on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45275973

Proposed SR&ED changes could boost tech companies and national productivity, experts say

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 22:05:33 +0000

Comment

SR&ED for public consumption companies is interesting.

Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 09:48:40 +0000

Comment

Fascinating sync approach development

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44833834

Cracking the Vault: How we found zero-day flaws in HashiCorp Vault

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 14:55:03 +0000

Comment

Great read with way too approachable and maybe relatable security issues.

Just having different ways to sanitize input at the API layer and logic layer resulting in these important security issues is so interesting and scary.

Being Nice to Reviewers: Splitting Large PRs in the AI Era

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 10:00:00 -0400

Note: This post was written with the assistance of an LLM (Claude), which seemed fitting given the topic. The ideas, experiences, and approach described are my own, but AI helped structure the writing and generate the example script—much like how AI can help us split large PRs while human judgment guides the strategy.

AI tools are making us incredibly productive at writing code. They are also making our pull requests massive. What used to be a 5-file feature now easily becomes 30+ files spanning database migrations, API endpoints, frontend components, tests, and configuration changes. This increased productivity is amazing, but it has created a new problem: we are overwhelming our reviewers.

Burn your title

Sun, 11 May 2025 12:57:14 +0000

My thoughts

titles reflect the minimum expected of us, not the maximum that is open to us.

Read the article: Burn your title

Reading Zanzibar

Sat, 03 May 2025 12:38:30 +0000

Comment

Really good high level look at Zanzibar, the vendor and ecosystem.

Distributed systems challenges by Fly.io

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 20:27:03 +0000

My thoughts

Great distributed systems challenges with Jensen’s Maelstrom as the test bed.

https://github.com/jepsen-io/maelstrom https://github.com/jepsen-io/maelstrom/tree/main/demo/go https://jepsen.io/

Read the article: Distributed systems challenges by Fly.io

The Nix 2004 Paper

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 16:52:42 +0000

My thoughts

From: https://thenewstack.io/kelsey-hightower-on-nix-vs-docker-is-there-a-different-way/

Read the article: The Nix 2004 Paper

go sync.Map

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 15:50:28 +0000

My thoughts

Amazing deep dive into go’s sync.Map

I was expecting a similar approach to https://github.com/xacrimon/dashmap / https://docs.rs/dashmap/latest/dashmap/ which does sharding to reduce lock contention.

sync.Map is pretty interesting, it offers CAS-like functions and has a whole state machine for entries in order to reduce lock contention.

I wonder which are the tradeoffs in the two approaches.

Read the article: go sync.Map

Tabular numbers

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 16:17:33 +0000

My thoughts

I had no idea you could use tabular numbers in CSS.

Added to GitHub design system https://github.com/primer/css/pull/2680

If the font does not support it, it gracefully fallback to normal numbers.

Read the article: Tabular numbers

Zizmor, GitHub action static analysis

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 01:11:10 +0000

My thoughts

Amazing set of security related static analysis rules for GitHub actions.

I did not know there were so many gotchas.

Read the article: Zizmor, GitHub action static analysis

Stop Syncing Everything

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 20:10:20 +0000

My thoughts

Announcing an interesting replication project: https://github.com/orbitinghail/graft

Offline-first & mobile apps: Simplify development and improve reliability by offloading replication and storage to Graft.

Cross-platform sync: Share data smoothly across devices, browsers, and platforms without vendor lock-in.

Stateless multi-writer replicas: Deploy replicas anywhere, including serverless and embedded environments.

Any data type: Replicate databases, files, or custom formats—all with strong consistency.

And some links:

libgraft for sqlite: https://github.com/orbitinghail/graft/blob/main/docs/sqlite.md
leap algorithm to prefetch: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/atc20-maruf.pdf

Read the article: Stop Syncing Everything

The software engineering identity crisis

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 11:53:45 +0000

My thoughts

Super interesting thoughts on the impact that AI has on software engineering.

Read the article: The software engineering identity crisis

RFC 9700 - Best Current Practice for OAuth 2.0 Security

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 17:33:34 +0000

My thoughts

With the proliferation of OAuth 2 and OpenId Connect RFCS, it has become very difficult to understand the best configuration / implementation for security.

This RFC summarizes all the current best practices.

My key takeaway is using PKCE for all client is recommended.

Read the article: RFC 9700 - Best Current Practice for OAuth 2.0 Security

Manifold's Decision Making Process

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 20:24:57 +0000

My thoughts

I successfully re-discovered this amazing article by VP Engineering of Manifold at the time: Gary Poster.

It can be summarized as:

If a decision will be cheap to reverse and have a low impact on its intended audience, just get some advice from a peer, as shown in the bottom left quadrant.

If it will be expensive to reverse, or have a high audience impact, ask two or three stakeholders for advice, as shown in the top left and bottom right quadrants. In engineering, good stakeholder candidates to consider are a known subject matter expert, your squad’s tech lead or product engineer, or a pertinent source in Marketing or Product.

Finally, if it’s both expensive to reverse and highly impactful, gather some data with rigor and present your proposal to some key stakeholders, as shown in the top right. Your proposal might be in the form of an RFC, a slide deck, or some analytics and a voiceover. Your stakeholders might include the previous group plus some more senior company leaders.

I am sad the chart was not archived though.

We are destroying software

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 16:19:26 +0000

My thoughts

Antirez listing all the ways we are destroying software.

A few that resonate the most with me:

We are destroying software pushing for rewrites of things that work.
We are destroying software claiming that code comments are useless.
We are destroying software mistaking it for a purely engineering discipline.
We are destroying software by always thinking that the de-facto standard for XYZ is better than what we can do, tailored specifically for our use case.

Read the article: We are destroying software

Satisficing

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 16:16:16 +0000

My thoughts

Satisficing is a decision-making strategy or cognitive heuristic that entails searching through the available alternatives until an acceptability threshold is met, without necessarily maximizing any specific objective.

Thanks to Martin Smith for mentioning this as a UX concept.

Read the article: Satisficing

Fish in rust

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 01:03:43 +0000

My thoughts

Story of porting fish to rust.

Read the article: Fish in rust

AWS Principal engineer roles framework

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 19:06:43 +0000

My thoughts

AWS VP shares a framework for Principal Engineer roles developed at Amazon. The framework defines six key roles: Sponsor (project lead), Guide (technical expert), Catalyst (idea launcher), Tie Breaker (decision maker), Catcher (project rescuer), and Participant (contributor). This helps organizations optimize senior engineers’ impact and develop talent effectively.

From pointer newsletter

Read the article: AWS Principal engineer roles framework

Problem driven development

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 13:31:38 +0000

My thoughts

Prioritizing problems to fix instead of the work itself.

Read the article: Problem driven development

Staging different parts of the same file with Git

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 17:42:32 +0000

My thoughts

y - stage this hunk
n - do not stage this hunk
q - quit; do not stage this hunk or any of the remaining ones
a - stage this hunk and all later hunks in the file
d - do not stage this hunk or any of the later hunks in the file
g - select a hunk to go to
/ - search for a hunk matching the given regex
j - leave this hunk undecided, see next undecided hunk
J - leave this hunk undecided, see next hunk
k - leave this hunk undecided, see previous undecided hunk
K - leave this hunk undecided, see previous hunk
s - split the current hunk into smaller hunks
e - manually edit the current hunk
? - print help

Workflow example:

How platform teams get stuff done

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 19:05:31 +0000

My thoughts

Platform teams have a unique reliance on other teams to ensure adoption of their platform - getting code changes into other teams’ codebase is critical to their success. There are a variety of patterns for that cross-team collaboration, and selecting the right ones depends on both the phase of platform adoption and the ability of both teams and codebases to accept external influence.

Such a great take at what it means to be a Platform Team and some tips to make intentional decisions on how to tackles problems.

Amazon S3 Adds Put-If-Match (Compare-and-Swap)

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 00:10:17 +0000

Comment

This is exciting!!

Also lots of tips or tricks on distributed computed stuff in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42240678

I might be a nerd, but I love the CAP theorem back and forth.

Pumas, Routers & Keepalives—Oh my!

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 23:48:00 +0000

Comment

Amazing write up of the investigation

What I wish someone told me about postgres

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 14:40:16 +0000

My thoughts

Really great set of tips with external links, code and, diagrams to help explain concepts.

I really like the explanation of the different types of locks.

Read the article: What I wish someone told me about postgres

Best Practices for Handling Per-Environment Configuration in Your JS/TS Applications

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 04:01:45 +0000

My thoughts

Great look at various ways to define config in JavaScript and typescript. It also covers the defineConfig pattern that so many packages have started to use.

Read the article: Best Practices for Handling Per-Environment Configuration in Your JS/TS Applications

engineering principles shared by Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 19:29:38 +0000

My thoughts

Some engineering principles shared by Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel:

Make it work, make it right, make it fast
Progressive disclosure of complexity
Minimize the number of concepts & modes
Most ‘flukes’ aren’t… your tech just sucks
Feedback must be given to users instantly
Maximize user exposure hours
Demo your software frequently to fresh eyes
Sweat every word of product copy you render
You’re never done working on performance
You’re never done. Software ages like milk, not wine
Visualizing traces of time is the best way to optimize it
Ship frequently and strive to build in public
Errors must have globally unique codes & hyperlinks
Red is not enough to signal “error” (8% of men have red-green color blindness)

Read the article: engineering principles shared by Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel

Against Incident Severities and in Favor of Incident Types

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 08:10:37 +0000

Comment

Ambiguous: Not fully sure. Things look bad, but not fully broken (this is our default type).
Internal: Chaos experiments, rollouts, non-customer impacting things, tests.
Security: Security incidents have distinct workflows and compliance requirements.
Time bomb: Internal, but we need a lot of hands on deck if we don’t want it to get worse.
Isolated: One or few customers, over limited components.
Major: Key features or important customers are definitely impacted. Warrants a big response.

Wow using these types over SEVs would have save me and my team so much time in the past.

TBM 318: Why Orgs Become Too Tall

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 13:15:53 +0000

My thoughts

Insightful look at the why behind companies become taller instead of more flat as the company adds employees.

My summary is that these factor play a role:

How much support do people need?
Are stakeholders pushing for some roles to signal some company maturity?
Was the company structure setup in a way where small teams were created in order to found and grow the teams?
Was the role of team management given as a way to give growth opportunity?
Is there a belief of ratio between IC and manager that influences teams to be smaller?
Is there a culture of individual projects or of team projects? Individual projects require someone to hand out there projects.
Are members of team working on unrelated projects with unrelated stakeholders or collaborators?
Is the manager workload shifted towards administrative tasks or team coordination tasks?
Are the teams starting more projects than they finish? (WIP)
How much interruptions are teams handling?
How much priority change is there?
How much turnover is there?
How much clarity do people have on their responsibilities, goals, and priorities? If the clarity is low, it requires more frequent alignment.

Read the article: TBM 318: Why Orgs Become Too Tall

AI Flame Graphs

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 11:20:51 +0000

Comment

GPU flame graphs. This is great especially as we start relying more and more on AI in the critical path of applications.

Paranoid NixOS on AWS

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 17:15:24 +0000

My thoughts

Creating robust cloud images (ex AWS IAM) from NixOS.

Just amazing. That coupled with https://xeiaso.net/blog/paranoid-nixos-2021-07-18/ provides lots of food for thought and food advice.

Read the article: Paranoid NixOS on AWS

The tough reality of being a "glue person"...

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 16:11:28 +0000

Comment

These bullet points feel very close to what I have experienced being a technical leader helping many teams and product lines.

Escaping the Chrome Sandbox Through DevTools

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 22:47:04 +0000

Comment

Amazing step by step investigation done around the Chrome enterprise policies which resulted in two Chrome/Chromium CVE.

Caches in rust

Thu, 03 Oct 2024 23:15:00 +0000

My thoughts

Amazing article about preventing &mut pollution in your rust code for functions that should just be simple getters.

Read the article: Caches in rust

The High Reliability Organization Perspective

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 12:28:05 +0000

My thoughts

Great paper highlighting how much intentionality is needed for High Reliability in organizations. I particularly enjoyed the mention of complacency, people and competing priorities factors that come into play.

Excerpt:

Failures are mostly related to the ability of the industry to effectively adapt to, and absorb variations, changes, disturbances, disruptions, and surprises

Rating organizations:

Preparedness/Anticipation: is the organization proactive in picking up on evidence of developing problems versus only reacting after problems become significant?
Opacity/Observability: does the organization monitor safety boundaries and recognize how close it is to “ the edge ” in terms of degraded defenses and barriers? To what extent is information about safety concerns widely distributed throughout the organization at all levels versus closely held by a few individuals?
Flexibility/Stiffness: how does the organization adapt to change, disruptions, and opportunities?

Read the article: The High Reliability Organization Perspective

Jevons Paradox

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 18:03:39 +0000

My thoughts

In economics, the Jevons paradox (sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced.

Seen here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41501146

Read the article: Jevons Paradox

Functional table driven tests in go

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 23:25:36 +0000

My thoughts

Putting a name on this approach is great. I have been using such an approach for a long time and it simplifies tests so much.

Read the article: Functional table driven tests in go

Sampling with SQL

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 15:45:37 +0000

My thoughts

Sampling with SQL and maths behind the approach

Read the article: Sampling with SQL

Minimum Viable CD

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 19:26:21 +0000

My thoughts

Great overview of the minimum CI and CD requirements to get the most out of them.

The most being: increased velocity, quality, engineering culture, developer experience, happiness.

Very similar to https://12factor.net/

Here are some highlights.

for CD:

All feature work stops when the pipeline is red.
Artifacts created by the pipeline always meet the organization’s definition of deployable. (Which makes me think of the definition of done of Scrum)
Rollback on-demand

For CI:

Beware the dopamine cartel

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 14:15:37 +0000

My thoughts

Analysis of today’s addictions in terms of dopamine and some small tips.

Read the article: Beware the dopamine cartel

How to be concise

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 15:01:34 +0000

My thoughts

Great thoughts on what it means to be concise and some tips.

Read the article: How to be concise

BM25

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 11:28:59 +0000

My thoughts

from simonw on HN:

BM25 is similar to TF/IDF. In both cases, the key idea is to consider statistics of the overall corpus as part of relevance calculations. If the user searches for “charities in new orleans” in a corpus where “new orleans” is only represented in a few documents, those should clearly rank highly. If the corpus has “new orleans” in almost every document then the term “charity” is more important.

Implementing faceted search with Django and PostgreSQL

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 11:20:44 +0000

My thoughts

Great detailed look at implementing faceted search using postgres.

This might alleviate the fact that postgres full text search does not support BM25.

more infor on postgres search in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41173288

Read the article: Implementing faceted search with Django and PostgreSQL

Inspiration & plans for (agile) retrospectives

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 17:41:21 +0000

My thoughts

Lots of great scenarios/templates for their four parts of a retrospective:

set the stage: Time to “arrive”, get into the right mood and focus on the goal.
Gather Data: Help everyone remember and create a shared pool of information.
Generate Insights: Why did things happen this way? Any patterns? See the big picture.
Close the retro: How could the retrospectives improve? Also clarify follow-up.

An amazing resource.

Read the article: Inspiration & plans for (agile) retrospectives

Categories of leadership on technical teams

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 00:38:59 +0000

My thoughts

interesting article identifying the different aspects of a team requiring leadership and provide example archetype of how team split up these leadership aspects between leaders.

Read the article: Categories of leadership on technical teams

A write-ahead log is not a universal part of durability

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 23:05:08 +0000

Comment

Interesting look at what WAL is and isn’t. HN has some good comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40844825

Instead of “auth”, we should say “permissions” and “login”

Mon, 27 May 2024 21:50:22 +0000

Comment

Sharing for aeonik’s comment on HN:

“Authorize” and “Authenticate” are excellent words. They go back to medieval times and haven’t changed meaning too much.

Everybody knows what an “authority” is. It means they have power or capability.

Everybody knows what authentic means. Something that is proven to be genuine.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40491480

Second-system effect

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 16:10:13 +0000

My thoughts

The second-system effect or second-system syndrome is the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to be succeeded by over-engineered, bloated systems, due to inflated expectations and overconfidence.

From the “The Mythical Man-Month”. Useful syndrome to keep in mind when “re-writing” a working system. The complexity of having parity and adding new capabilities is often underestimated.

Read the article: Second-system effect

An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 15:45:14 +0000

My thoughts

Really down to earth list by Camille Fournier.

My highlights:

How to find interesting work on your own, instead of waiting for someone to bring it to you
How to get information about what’s really happening (how to gossip, how to network)
How to repeat yourself enough that people start to listen
How to teach another engineer to care about that thing you really care about (operations, correctness, testing, code quality, performance, simplicity, etc)
How to listen to other engineers’ ideas without feeling threatened
How to lead a project even though you don’t manage any of the people working on the project

Read the article: An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding

Making very intentional career choices

Sat, 16 Mar 2024 23:51:15 +0000

My thoughts

I think the four factors described make a lot of sense:

what kind of life you want to create
your superpowers
what type of work energizes you
what type of people you love working with

I am a huge fan of intentionality. What is described is being able to recognize peer/cultural/social pressure in order to focus our what type of environment works for you. That aspect brings another layer to intentionality by also addressing our own bias and improving our decision making.

Getting Things Done In A Chaotic Environment

Sat, 16 Mar 2024 23:31:33 +0000

My thoughts

One of the first things my CEO told me is that things move fast, so you have to get things done as completely as possible and move on to the next thing.

I feel this means completely finish whatever urgent and non important tasks that come up as quickly as possible so that you can get back to the important tasks.

I also love the expression: “The number one cause of a page or an incident is not solving the last page or incident”.

TBM 274: How Capable Leaders Navigate Uncertainty and Ambiguity

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 19:51:16 +0000

Comment

Amazing post containing data about what feels like a very humane / empathetic leadership approach to navigating unknown / uncertainty.

It is putting complex concepts into easily understandable words. It really helps turn approaches I have observed and value a lot into into an actionable list.

Really a treasure chest of tips.

Accept We Are Part of the Problem
Encourage New Interaction Patterns
Patient Divergence
Identify Plausible Contributors / Multiple “Causes”
Power of the Present
Blend Diverse Perspectives
Patience and Self-Repair
Anticipate Effects
Curiosity and Light Touch
Both/And
Intervene Safely
Abduction and Intuition
Accept Diverse Strengths and Skills
Collaboratively Sense and Shape
Coherence vs. Alignment
Plant Seeds—Watch Them Grow
Tailor Ways of Working
Facing Uncertainty

Parkinson's law, Work complicates to fill the available time

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 22:08:36 +0000

My thoughts

I was reminded of this law from https://theengineeringmanager.substack.com/p/parkinsons-law-its-real-so-use-it

James wrote:

without tight time constraints, the scope of a team’s project will expand to fill the time available.

I have seen so many different teams falling in that trap: Teams tackling every edge cases even if not required by any users, newly found edge cases requiring a rewrite of a feature not yet shipped, teams burning the midnight oil on an ever expanding project scope…

How I write HTTP services in Go after 13 years

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 20:51:31 +0000

My thoughts

Interesting take on setting up an HTTP service. They mention that using grpc or different protocols might require to adjust the structure. I would be curious to get their take on a service supporting grpc and HTTP to help me revisit older decisions.

The signal.NotifyContext(ctx, os.Interrupt) approach to cancel context on interrupt is really an improvement over starting a goroutine and using Notify with a channel.

Best advice is to not use global scope to allow parallel testing without sporadic failures. Usinh os.GetEnv by passing a func(string) makes so much since.

TBM 269: Three Organizational Design Principles

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 23:01:59 +0000

Comment

I really like the final four points:

Encapsulate complexity to your advantage. Make sure people can collaborate closely when the work requires it.
Establish clear transactional relationships and interfaces between groups that don’t require intensive collaboration. Good walls make good neighbors.
Make sure that managers and leaders maintain relationships that mimic the relationships required by the people doing the work.
If possible, genuinely simplify our business processes—true simplification, not just in name.

Macaroons Escalated Quickly

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 04:18:55 +0000

Comment

Super interesting approach that is very pragmatic and very similar to the aws access keys of AWS but much more powerful.

Questionable Advice: “My boss says we don’t need any engineering managers. Is he right?”

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 01:12:05 +0000

Comment

Amazing take explaining why managers are needed.

I really like the graph theory image where without managers, each engineer need to maintain a relationship with a lot of engineers instead of focusing on outcomes.

The three email addresses of OpenID Connect (OIDC) in practice

Sun, 17 Dec 2023 05:12:06 +0000

Comment

Linking the validity of email domains to their OIDC provider domain is something I had never heard before.

But the whole SSO domain ownership is full of interesting security implications.

Can't Be Fucked: Underrated Cause of Tech Debt

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 23:37:28 +0000

Comment

Funny (real?) take on another cause for tech debt.

The HN comments are amazing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37859311 but sometimes a little depressing.

NIST Elliptic Curves Seeds Bounty

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 10:27:18 +0000

Comment

Amazing story of the NIST curves.

Insomnium – Local, privacy-focused fork of Insomnia API client

Sat, 30 Sep 2023 00:23:23 +0000

Comment

Insomnia require an account now. HN has alternatives https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37708582

Choose Postgres queue technology

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 00:08:11 +0000

Comment

Great points about tech tradeoffs and pragmatism.

The SELECT FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCK approach is really interesting.

HN has more good examples and a list of tradeoffs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37636841

Blueprint for a distributed multi-region IAM with Go and CockroachDB

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 23:20:03 +0000

Comment

Amazing blog post on having a global identity service and all the concerns to look into.

It also mentions the decision that Ory made to build their cloud in that way.

Lots of really good callouts like disaster recovery, latency, consistency, and an approach to also have data residency in a global service.

HN for other people’s take on the approach https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37048409

JavaScript Gom Jabbar

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 10:55:34 +0000

Comment

Deep dive into node’s package.json and all the history behind it.

I think Zig is hard but worth it

Thu, 01 Jun 2023 22:58:37 +0000

Comment

Interesting look at zig. Interesting HN comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36149462

Lost John Coltrane recording, from experimental phase with Eric Dolphy, emerges

Thu, 01 Jun 2023 09:35:49 +0000

Comment

Great comments on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36146905

Architects, Anti-Patterns, and Organizational Fuckery

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 12:38:11 +0000

Comment

Amazing blog posts. Lots of exploration in the different architect archetypes, staff and principal engineers.

The title is a bit strong. But the post itself takes a more nuanced approach.

I really enjoyed it.

Let It Fail

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 12:26:30 +0000

Comment

Interesting take on changing systems without relying on heroism and without trying to get prioritized project that don’t seem to have business value. Letting things fail (in a controlled way) can help align and change the systems. Being proactive is not always the best approach.

Things did indeed break. But as they did something else happened: our product team began to see the legacy system would not support the business goals and they went from somewhat passive admirers of the theory to active evangelists of the platform work. As the legacy system buckled under new demands, the conversation quickly evolved from, “How do I prioritize this new feature?” to “How do we create space for holistic system work such that we can build better features?” When it became evident the platform work supported the net-new work, the product and engineering teams led prioritization together.

“Yes, if”: Iterating on our RFC Process

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 12:27:06 +0000

Comment

Interesting take on a RFC process. At Hashi, RFCs are used to provide teams with more de decision making powers as opposed to centralizing reviewing and decision to a council. Trade-offs.

HN comments provide other opinions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34946844

SQL should be the default choice for data engineering pipelines

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 12:49:58 +0000

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Interesting take into data pipelines.

We invested 10% to pay back tech debt

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 13:23:32 +0000

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From HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34394351) :

If you assign a block of time to quality, you risk people taking that as an excuse to not focus on quality outside that block.

I feel like this has been my worry and experience for a while. Good teams I have been at shipped quality by default. They would not require bug blitz or similar. Except for well defined area of complexity or integration with another team.

What happens when babies are left to cry it out?

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 01:54:15 +0000

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Interesting view of the studies done in that domain. Summary and opinions available on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34173006

Police, prosecutors used junk science to decide 911 callers were liars

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 01:40:30 +0000

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Great research, sad reality

How are you doing?

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 12:23:57 +0000

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Trigger warning: some mention of very negative thoughts.

I thought this exercise was great. Being able to map feelings, colors, how it impacts your body.

Self-awareness and so difficult for with all the stimuli we face everyday.

Salary Transparency

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 03:32:54 +0000

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This is something I might consider. My own salary page.

Why Some Feedback Hurts (and What To Do About It)

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 12:20:27 +0000

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Giving feedback is difficult. Getting hurtful feedback is so difficult to digest.

I really like this part about it being ok to ignore feedback when it is not aligned with your goals. But to make sure to emphatize with the feedback.

Changes that will be too difficult or costly to undertake: By no means should you feel compelled to accede to all of the hurtful feedback you receive. Some of the changes people are asking for will either impose an intolerable burden on you or will prevent you from accomplishing your goals as a leader. But bear in mind that they’re requesting these changes because these behaviors or aspects of your style are imposing a cost on them. You need not grant their request or agree with their point of view, but you can empathize with it.

The Importance of Shared Narrative

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 12:16:53 +0000

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Storytelling as a leadership tool. I love it.

involve getting out of your comfort zone and dealing with vulnerability and even embarrassment. (If you never feel these feelings, you’re playing it safe and being too cautious.)

Build Your Career on Dirty Work

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 12:25:42 +0000

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Interesting take on making an impact.

We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 03:05:03 +0000

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Wow amazing story of fraud management in onenofnthe first MMO game.

age and Authenticated Encryption

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 23:49:40 +0000

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Amazing post with so many examples and details around encryption and authentication.

Very well written and so informative.

The Disappearing Art of Maintenance

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 22:43:14 +0000

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Interesting that maintenance issues in non tech domains are very similar to maintenance and tech debt management in tech.

Coming from the human nature: short term gains are often more prioritized over greater long term gains.

From HN:

When I studied Chinese in primary school, there was one ancient text that spoke about a discussion between a king and a famous doctor. The doctor explained that his brother was superior than him in the medical science but no one heard about him because he could always treat small illnesses before then evolved into terminal ones, so people said, “Oh he is a fine doctor, but he only treats minor illnesses”.

Ask HN: Name 3-5 books that had the most impact on your career and knowledge?

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 23:14:30 +0000

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Great list of books

There is no “software supply chain”

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 22:59:03 +0000

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Interesting takes on the software supply chain.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32902938

In HN a comment is very interesting:

This will sound pretty harsh, but if your company chooses to use open source code that does not have capable, paid, full time professionals reviewing it for security and quality, then your company is signing up for that responsibility. If you make no reasonable attempt at vetting your supply chain and harm comes to users as a result, then IMO you should be liable for negligence just like a restaurant serving food with poisonous ingredients. Broadly normalized negligence is still negligence.

Using WebTransport

Sat, 17 Sep 2022 13:22:52 +0000

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My understanding: UDP websockets. Pretty interesting tech.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32867644

Working Iteratively

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 01:46:33 +0000

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Great article about working iteratively

How to help crying infants sleep. Study suggests a two-part path: “walk-to-sit” [pdf]

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 08:53:20 +0000

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Research paper about infant sleep. Hacker news comments are also very good with lots of tips: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32845229

(I am reviewing this while my 1yo has decided to not go back to sleep. Been awake for 3 hour and it is 5am)

Senior Engineers Are Living in the Future

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 02:28:53 +0000

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Great explanation of how senior engineers got to where they are and the feedback loop giving them all informations to seem like they are from the future.

Ask HN: Do you use foreign keys in relational databases?

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:39:00 +0000

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Most common opinion seems to be to treat our database as precious and therefore protect its integrity.