This week I found myself digging through the code of c4, an implementation of C “in four functions”, by Robert Swierczek. I remember coming across c4 when it was released ten years ago. It got me excited: hey, C in four functions, that means it’s easy to understand right? | Continue reading
My favorite teacher wasn’t a very popular guy. He was confident, had strong opinions, and didn’t exactly teach like the other teachers. He was our history & sociology teacher in 12th and 13th grade and he made us summarize. He made us summarize everything. Through summaries, he t … | Continue reading
Last week I got a new monitor, after my old one has shown worse and worse signs of what looked like burn-ins. The new monitor allowed me to get rid of two (!) cables in my setup, which pleased me quite a bit. And since there are people reading this whose eyebrows went up at the “ … | Continue reading
This week, we’re back the original idea behind this newsletter – a newsletter that’s informal and “what I’d send you if you were to ask me what’s on my mind this week.” On my mind this week: the sea. It started last weekend when I read William Langewiesche | Continue reading
Whenever I talk with programmer friends about Apple I try to sneak the following story in. Usually I start with “did you that Apple…?” and end by leaning back in the chair, my index finger pointing at the table, and me saying “… now that’s engineering.” | Continue reading
After around 20 years of using Vim, in December last year I switched to Zed as my main editor. Since some friends have asked me about the switch — “Now that you work at Zed, are you using Zed instead of Vim?” — I thought I’d write about it. You now know that I did switch, yes, so … | Continue reading
In my neighbor’s garden stand two birches, tall and elegant, making pleasant sounds in the wind. Right next to them is an apple tree on which sometimes a green woodpecker tock-tocks. To its left: a cherry tree that’s still impressively large even though they cut it down a few wee … | Continue reading
Here’s what I consider to be the basics. I call them that not because they’re easy, but because they’re fundamental. The foundation on which your advanced skills and expertise rest. Multipliers and nullifiers, makers and breakers, of everything you do. | Continue reading
Or: Losing Faith | Continue reading
An investigation. | Continue reading
Protocol of a little over two days of AI | Continue reading
In admiration of some of the best programmers I've worked with | Continue reading
So zero-cost abstractions exist? | Continue reading
In my first week at Zed it took until the third day for someone to hop on a video call with me. The second video call happened in the week after that. Since then — I’ve just completed four weeks — I’ve only had two other video calls, both of which were | Continue reading
When we were 16 years old my friend and I spray-painted our keyboards in camouflage colors. We had just seen Hackers, wanted to copy what we saw, and – yes, 16 years old – didn’t think much further than (1) get spray paint (2) spray-paint the keyboard. Only afte … | Continue reading
On pineapple, tests, opinions & taste, and other things | Continue reading
Let's talk about shell history. | Continue reading
Does it start in less than a second? | Continue reading
Setting up a new MacBook Pro M3 Max | Continue reading
Have you noticed that the newest versions of Chrome on macOS show how much memory a tab is using? I don’t mean something in the developer tools, or an internal process manager. No, you now only have to hover your cursor over a tab and Chrome tells you: this one uses 60MB, t … | Continue reading
This is my last week at Sourcegraph. Today’s my last day. At 6pm my computer will be wiped cleaned and 4.5 years come to end. 4.5 years so dense that at other companies the clock would probably show 8, or 10 years. Why am I leaving? Over the past few months I realised that … | Continue reading
When Product & Engineering Meet | Continue reading
I told you before that I could write more about The Bear’s S2E7. Here we are. I came across this clip from that episode this week and decided now’s the time. The scene is a dialogue between Ritchie, who works in a high-class restaurant for the first time, and Garrett, … | Continue reading
The first time I came across the term pathological system I had to look up what it means. The definition I found was similar to this: pathological system: exhibits extreme, abnormal, or self-destructive behaviors Second time I came across it was in Bryan Cantrill’s | Continue reading
There’s a bit in Louis CK’s Live at the Comedy Store that I’ve been thinking about ever since I first saw it in 2015. It’s about someone saying they’re “not an asshole” (yes, it gained another layer of meaning after the misconduct revelat … | Continue reading
Last weekend I watched this video of Andreas Kling prototyping a JIT compiler for his Ladybird browser: It’s a very interesting video, for two reasons. One: if you’re interested in how bytecode VMs and JIT compilers work, it’s all in there, explained step by ste … | Continue reading
Here’s a very interesting bit of Zig that I came across again this week: @fieldParentPtr. It’s a prism through which you can see a lot of Zig’s character. That’s not what the official docs say, of course. They say that @fieldParentPtr: Given a pointer to a field, returns the base … | Continue reading
I love debugging – clear goal, possibly interesting technical surprises, total freedom in approach, and coloring-in-the-lines creativity required. Sometimes when I get assigned a bug I even feel something that could be described as glee. But of course it’s not all lov … | Continue reading
This was my week off and I wanted to learn some more Zig. What I did: dug into the Zig compiler, wrote toy programs to replicate parts of it, tried to understand the Zig way of doing things. I’ve also spent two days hacking a GTK feature into Ghostty | Continue reading
All the things I could do | Continue reading
Rules are an endless source of fascination and dread to me. How rules are created and why, how rules accumulate, how a set of rules shapes a system – it’s very, very interesting. Let me give you an example. A couple years ago my wife and I were chatting with our tax a … | Continue reading
Every time I’m in the gym I use the same app on my phone: KeyLifts. For 3 years now, four to five times a week, the same app. I love it. I pay for the yearly subscription and the app is a huge if not the only reason why I’ve been running the same workout program (5/3/ … | Continue reading
What if software was like science in the early 20th century? | Continue reading
This week I was talking with a teammate about a programming language he’s exploring. He said: “I’m just not sure whether I like it or not” Huh, I thought. Right, you think you have to like something or not. Easy mistake to make. The internet’s opinio … | Continue reading
Or: Catching Up With Carmack | Continue reading
Or: the goal is to be a monkey swinging through the trees | Continue reading
Or: Why I'm So Into Code | Continue reading
You’re reading Register Spill, my weekly newsletter in which I share thoughts I can’t keep in my head. A couple weeks ago, on social media, a dad was talking about the best materials to teach his kid how to program. It’s a very interesting thread and I recommend … | Continue reading
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been listening to the Software Engineering at Google book. I’ve read one or two chapters over the past few years, but never the whole thing. While listening to the chapters on testing, I’ve had something of a personal lightbulb moment. Or: smile-to-m … | Continue reading