Building an IDE Plugin the Same Week You Build the Language
Most languages add tooling years after the compiler. I built the Yar IntelliJ plugin while the compiler was still changing, and that changed the language design.
Latest writing
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Conservative Garbage Collection in 300 Lines of C
Implementing a garbage collector for the Yar compiler meant conservative stack scanning, mark-and-sweep, setjmp for registers, heap growth targets, and one ugly thread-safety constraint.
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Designing a Package Manager When You Don't Have One
Yar needed imports across project boundaries, so I built a small package manager: Git dependencies, alias-based imports, content-addressed caching, transitive resolution, lockfiles, and no registry.
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I Asked ChatGPT If Building a Language Was Hard. Now I Have a Compiler.
Four months ago I asked ChatGPT a dumb question while walking my dog. It told me building a programming language wasn’t that hard. Now I have a compiler, a type system, generics, structured concurrency, and a garbage collector.
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Why I Stopped Using Spotify
· music
I thought streaming was the ethical upgrade from piracy. Turns out it just made music disposable. Now I buy CDs, pirate FLACs, and actually listen to albums again.
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AI Coding Agents Need Memory
Stateless agents repeat mistakes. lgtm and snap use a findings file, shared codebase context, and recovery loops so later tasks can use what earlier tasks already learned.
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Mokapot: Building a Local AWS Mock That Actually Works
· go
Why I built mokapot — a single Go binary that speaks SQS and SNS well enough for real AWS SDKs to connect without configuration changes. Persistence, filter policies, and the tricky parts of faking a cloud service locally.
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The Details That Make CLI Tools Feel Professional
Four real examples from recent Go CLI projects — bracketed paste handling, a scripting DSL, safe symlink restoration, and diff truncation — that show how small decisions separate a script from a tool people trust.
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The Gold Standard: CLI Design Principles for Production Systems
· cli
Defining the ‘Gold Standard’ for production-ready CLIs: TTY-aware behavior, clean stdout vs stderr contracts, JSON output for automation, and idempotent mutations.
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Toasts with HTMX: a Small Way to Say "It Worked"
· web
A toast notification does not need React, a provider, a portal, or a bundle. HTMX out-of-band swaps plus a little CSS get most of the way there.