Printing Lists Aug 14, 2026 To print a comma-separated list, a concise idiom is to optionally print the comma first, before the element: for (items, 0..) |item, item_index| { if (item_index > 0) std.debug.print(", "); std.debug.print("{}",
Zig’s Io.Threaded is Neat Aug 6, 2026 std.Io.Threaded is one of the implementations of Zig’s new Io interface that enables concurrency. This is a boring “just use threads” impl. I personally find it neat though — it does this weird thing th…
Memory Safety’s Hardest Problem Jul 20, 2026 Uplifting a lobsters comment for easier reference. The central memory safety counter example, the hardest case to solve, doesn’t have anything to do with destructors or heap: const std = @import(…
The standard answer to managing dotfiles on NixOS is home-manager. I’ve never used it, due to two aesthetic and one practical objection: The approach I like is storing dotfiles in the same repository as flake.nix / configuration.nix and sym…
A small Mechanical Habit today: When using not rocket science rule / merge queue, continue to redundantly run the full test suite on main. Maintain an easily accessible list of recent main failures — these are the flaky tests to eradicate.
I have an early adulthood trauma from struggling to understand consensus amidst a myriad of poor explanations. I am overcompensating for that by adding my own attempts to the fray. Today, I want to draw a series of pictures which could be h…
In Majjit LSP, I described an idea of implementing Magit style UX for jj once and for all, leveraging LSP protocol. I’ve learned today that the upcoming 3.18 version of LSP has a feature to make this massively less hacky: Text Document Cont…
I was today years old when I realized that: It’s a good idea to limit line length to about 100 columns. This is a physical limit, the width at which you can still comfortably fit two editors side by side (see Size Matters). Note an apparent…
Something truly monumental happened in the world of software development in 2025. Safari shipped a reasonable implementation of text-wrap: pretty: https://webkit.org/blog/16547/better-typography-with-text-wrap-pretty/. We are getting closer…
In efficiency-minded code, it is idiomatic to use indexes rather than pointers. Indexes have several advantages: First, they save memory. Typically a 32-bit index is enough, a saving of four bytes per pointer on 64-bit architectures. I have…
TigerBeetle famously uses “static allocation”. Infamously, the use of the term is idiosyncratic: what is meant is not static arrays, as found in embedded development, but rather a weaker “no allocation after startup” form. The amount of mem…
My schtick as a software engineer is establishing automated processes — mechanically enforced patterns of behavior. I have collected a Santa Claus bag of specific tricks I’ve learned from different people, and want to share them in turn. Ca…