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rednafi

1,911 karma

https://rednafi.com/about | redowan.nafi[at]gmail.com

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rednafi.com 1mo ago

If you won't carry the pager, maybe don't push to mainline

rednafi
4pts0
rednafi.com 5mo ago

Structured Concurrency and Go

rednafi
3pts1
revontulet.dev 7mo ago

No Shave November Through the Eyes of Face Detection

rednafi
1pts0
revontulet.dev 8mo ago

iPhone Ethernet Bridge on RaspberryPi with Ubuntu Server

rednafi
1pts0
ics.uci.edu 9mo ago

Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: An Apostate's Opinion [pdf]

rednafi
2pts0
rednafi.com 10mo ago

Test State, Not Interactions

rednafi
2pts0
revontulet.dev 10mo ago

Don't Let Your Mocks Mock You

rednafi
2pts0
revontulet.dev 11mo ago

The Cost of Slow Feedback Loops

rednafi
5pts3
buf.build 1y ago

Oneofs are a disaster. Protovalidate has fixed them

rednafi
1pts0
antonz.org 1y ago

Gist of Go: Race Conditions

rednafi
1pts0
moonbase.lgbt 1y ago

You LLM-loving motherfuckers can pry the em dash from my cold dead hands

rednafi
12pts0
lucumr.pocoo.org 1y ago

Agentic Coding Recommendations

rednafi
296pts203
revontulet.dev 1y ago

AI-first – We're just 6 months away from AGI

rednafi
23pts49
jnsgr.uk 1y ago

Own Your Calendar

rednafi
5pts0
brandur.org 1y ago

The right way to do data fixtures in Go

rednafi
3pts0
slate.com 1y ago

Careless People Review

rednafi
13pts1
www.jerf.org 1y ago

Go FAQ: The Pipe Operator in Generics Is Not a Sum Type

rednafi
2pts0
psychologyfor.com 1y ago

Ulysses Contract: What It Is, How It Is Used, and Examples

rednafi
2pts0
lucumr.pocoo.org 1y ago

Ugly Code and Dumb Things

rednafi
2pts2
www.youtube.com 1y ago

I Use LLMs [video]

rednafi
2pts0
rednafi.com 1y ago

Dotfile Stewardship for the Indolent

rednafi
2pts1
www.youtube.com 1y ago

The Scandalous Story of the Dreadful Code Written by the Best of Us [video]

rednafi
1pts0
blog.sbstp.ca 1y ago

Go Quirks

rednafi
5pts0
eli.thegreenplace.net 1y ago

A comprehensive guide to go generate

rednafi
2pts0
www.youtube.com 1y ago

What Goes Around Comes Around and Around – Andy Pavlo (Dijkstra Award 2024) [video]

rednafi
1pts0
rednafi.com 1y ago

Why does Go's io.Reader have such a weird signature?

rednafi
3pts0
dave.cheney.net 1y ago

Channel Axioms

rednafi
1pts0
dave.cheney.net 1y ago

Curious Channel

rednafi
1pts0
www.youtube.com 1y ago

Reconciling Everything

rednafi
1pts0
rednafi.com 1y ago

Go Slice Gotchas

rednafi
2pts0

Go syntax and the Go runtime would be the perfect combo for me. Oh well...

I love Rust for what it is, but for most of my projects, I can’t justify the added complexity. Sure, there are a bunch of things I miss from the Rust world when I’m working on large-scale distsys services in Go, but introducing Rust in that space would be a recipe for disaster.

I guess the Go team knows that if they start adding everyone’s favorite Rust features, the language would become unrecognizable. So we’re not getting terser error-handling syntax or enums. Having union types would be nice too.

But I work in platform engineering, so my needs are quite different from someone writing business logic in Go. I understand that having a more expressive syntax is nice when you’re writing complex business code, but in reality, that almost always comes with a complexity/fragility tradeoff. That’s part of the reason no one wants to use Rust to write their business logic, despite it being so much more expressive.

For distsys, programming ergonomics matter far less compared to robustness and introspectability. So the Go runtime with Go syntax is perfect for this. But of course, that’s not true for all use cases.

Sorry for the rant - completely uncalled for. This is a cool project nonetheless :)

This is great. But I’ve bookmarked at least 10 of these aggregators over the years, and I never revisit any of them. Partly because I don’t have the time to browse and discover new content.

I also don’t read the blog spam from prolific writers who pop up here every two days, especially the low-quality ones constantly yapping about AI. So the number of blogs I revisit is a handful, and I have a page on my site listing them [1]. Some of the blogs I’ve listed also have backlinks to my site. It’s super simple and works fairly well for me. Plus there’s rss.

[1] https://rednafi.com/blogroll/

Europe doesn’t do software better - not because it can’t, but because it can’t afford to drop the GDP of a country to build a single app like some of its US counterparts can.

It might feel performative to some people, but Europe just doesn’t trust the US, and arguably shouldn’t. So it’s not about demonstrating superiority in software, but rather showing that there are alternatives you can choose if you want to.

"Their experience is different from mine; therefore, they haven't worked in big tech" is a bit reductionist.

While it's true that in large companies you typically have much less agency than you think and sometimes have to work on things that don’t resonate with you, large companies also have many different teams you can switch to.

So saying this should be the norm is what people have a problem with. Plus, moving to a different workplace is always an option.

If you decide to collect the paycheck and do the work, that’s okay too. But touting it as the norm and saying everyone should do it is gaslighting.

IDK why these vacuous corpo tropes appear on the front page of HN every now and then. Sounds like exactly what a quasi-technical, management-leaning staff engineer would say.

Sure, in the end we work for these faceless, meat-grinding machines. But more or less, we all have some semblance of autonomy, and I absolutely can choose not to work on a product that people hate. I can switch teams before switching companies.

To some extent, I also just do what leadership asks, keep my mouth shut, and collect paychecks. But whenever that happens, I don’t gaslight myself by writing a post on why it's supposed to be this way.

To me, this seems like someone who is married to their paycheck and would do whatever necessary to protect that.

It's great that they are recreating much of the fundamental software stack using LLMs. But if you're going to 'vibeslop,' at least do it in a language other than JavaScript.

I struggle to understand why anyone would want to generate code in TypeScript - unless what you're building truly can't be done in Go, Rust, or Kotlin; anything but JS.

I’m not sure how much of an improvement it really is to rewrite something from PHP to TypeScript while claiming security benefits.

I dream of a SQL like engine for distributed systems where you can declaratively say "svc A uses the results of B & C where C depends on D."

Then the engine would find the best way to resolve the graph and fetch the results. You could still add your imperative logic on top of the fetched results, but you don't concern yourself with the minutiae of resilience patterns and how to traverse the dependency graph.

I follow this religiously. The process of posting is manual but it works fairly well if your intention is good and you're not blog spamming in different forums.

But I intentionally haven't added a comment section to my blog [1]. Mostly because I don't get paid to write there and addressing the comments - even the good ones - requires a ton of energy.

Also, scaling the comment section is a pain. I had disqus integrated into my Hugo site but it became a mess when people started having actual discussion and the section got longer and longer.

If the write ups are any useful, it generally appears here or reddit and I often link back those discussions in the articles. That's good enough for me.

[1] https://rednafi.com

Ant Mill 4 months ago

We have vibe leadership mills where AGI-pilled leaders are driving their companies into a death spiral.

There is literally no reason to write it in a JVM language in 2026 when better options exists. Either Go for simplicity and maintaininability or Rust to get the most out of the machine works.

Also, it'll be hard for them to lure good people to work on that thing. Absolutely no one is getting excited to write, vibe, or maintain Java.

I come from a developing country where the only OS people know is Windows. Macs used to be too expensive, and Linux didn’t have any of the applications people would use (read: pirate) for work.

Typically, college students and teachers would get $500 dingy laptops from Asus, Acer, and Dell. A decade ago, those machines were fine. My mom used one for 7 years, right until they retired Windows 7.

Then the machines started becoming absolutely useless with Windows 8, 10, and now 11. 8GB machines are barely usable now, with constant Windows updates and all the background telemetry services maxing out the disk all the time.

Sure, people can turn off some of these rogue processes. But my point is - an OS should just disappear from the user’s view and let them work.

I don’t live in my home country and haven’t visited in a long time, but I’ve heard that people are really opting for second-hand MacBook Airs. Now with the MacBook Neo, more people will go that route.

Students are opting for cheap Windows machines and flashing them with Ubuntu to make them usable.

Ha ha I wish. Then both corporate and your coworkers hate you.

Also, there is no point in asking questions when you know that they just yoloed it and won't be able to answer anything.

We have collectively lost our common sense and reasonable people are doing unreasonable things because there's an immense amount of pressure from the top.

The world could use one less "how I slop" article at this point.

This reminds me of the early Medium days when everyone would write articles on how to make HTTP endpoints or how to use Pandas.

There’s not much skill involved in hauling agents, and you can still do it without losing your expertise in the stuff you actually like to work with.

For me, I work with these tools all the time, and reading these articles hasn’t added anything to my repertoire so far. It gives me the feeling of "bikeshedding about tools instead of actually building something useful with them."

We are collectively addicted to making software that no one wants to use. Even I don’t consistently use half the junk I built with these tools.

Another thing is that everyone yapping about how great AI is isn’t actually showing the tools’ capabilities in building greenfield stuff. In reality, we have to do a lot more brownfield work that’s super boring, and AI isn’t as effective there.

Yep and now we are encouraged to use AI to review the code as well. But if shit hits the fan then you are held responsible.

If you run a loop alongside the agent and make PRs that are tractable, then there isn’t much difference. But to me, it seems like we have collectively lost our minds and think it’s okay to make a 10k LOC PR and ask someone else to review it.

I also work at a huge company, and this observation is true. The way AI is being rammed down our throats is burning out the best engineers. OTOH, the mediocre simian army “empowered” by AI is pushing slop like there’s no tomorrow. The expectation from leadership, who tried Claude for a single evening, is that you should be able to deliver everything yesterday.

The resilience of the system has taken a massive hit, and we were told that it doesn’t matter. Managers, designers, and product folks are being asked to make PRs. When things cause Sev0 or Sev1 incidents, engineers are being held responsible. It’s a huge clown show.

I have always enjoyed the feeling of aporia during coding. Learning to embrace the confusion and the eventual frustration is part of the job. So I don’t mind running in a loop alongside an agent.

But I absolutely loathe reviewing these generated PRs - more so when I know the submitter themselves has barely looked at the code. Now corporate has mandated AI usage and is asking people to do 10k LOC PRs every day. Reviewing this junk has become exhausting.

I don’t want to read your code if you haven’t bothered to read it yourselves. My stance is: reviewing this junk is far more exhausting. Coding is actually the fun part.

Soon, we'll start seeing Claude certs getting listed on LinkedIn alongside Coursera courses.

People with titles like

Giga Chad, MBA, CSS, CKAD, XXX, PQRS

are gonna love this.

In no time, HRs will start slapping “10 years of certified Claude Code experience required” on job listings.