Engineering @ Stripe. Ex-Heroku. Occasional writer. Themes: web APIs, Postgres, Rust, software safety and resilience, efficient human interfaces, and running.

San Francisco
Joined March 2009
Sent Nanoglyph 018 about Ractors in Ruby 3. A more faithful implementation of the actor model than something Goroutines/channels. Two styles of message passing to get whatever blocking/non-blocking semantics you want to have. brandur.org/nanoglyphs/018-r…
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Yet another Gmail HTML/web oddity: it won’t display an SVG. To this day the only reliable way of discovering what quirky subset of HTML Gmail supports is trial and error. I’m afraid to even look how my emails render on other even-quirkier web clients like Outlook or AOL.
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Played around with Ractors last weekend. Very happy there’s finally parallelism in Ruby. Worth noting that they’re currently not much use because so much Ruby relies on ambient global state. e.g. Can’t parse TOML in a Ractor, can’t render Markdown. Mostly stdlib-only right now.
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Brandur retweeted
What's good about offset pagination; designing parallel cursor-based web APIs — by @brandur buff.ly/3ovE4Nl #API
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A few romantic shots of Banff to help get your week started. Can't believe I'm still hiking in January.
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Update on Homebrew on M1: Works great now, and I was able to get rid of the second x86 Homebrew install that ran some programs under Rosetta. For my money, there are no blockers left in these being great machines for development. More detail: brandur.org/fragments/homebr…
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Nice thinking around easing Ractors into the Ruby ecosystem from @kirshatrov. Ruby relies heavily on global state so bringing them in at the "top" will be difficult initially, but they're more amenable at the "bottom" where less state needs to be shared. kirshatrov.com/2021/01/06/ru…
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RE WhatsApp Facebook-itzation: Baffled by the number of claims of “I left WhatsApp by “just” switching me and every person I know over to Signal!” Very hard to believe, but they seem to believe what they’re saying. Not sure where the disconnect is, but installed Signal anyway.
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Over 5 years ago my then-colleague @brandur wrote about problems with Postgres queues and the accumulation of garbage MVCC versions (see brandur.org/postgres-queues). Expect significant improvements in this area for Postgres 14: postgr.es/m/CAGnEbogATZS1mWM…
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