LLMs have made generating code nearly free, but maintaining it hasn't changed. On the growing plague of code that shouldn't exist and the discipline of searching before building.

Disposable Software: When generating code costs less than finding it

Integrating a third-party LLM SDK does not make you an AI Engineer: a rant on the inflation of job titles in the age of ChatGPT wrappers.

The Absurdity of the term "AI Engineer"

Hands-on guide to the upcoming SQL/PGQ graph syntax using a patched Postgres 18 beta.

Experimenting with SQL:2023 Property-Graph Queries in Postgres 18

Reflections and hard-won lessons from a decade exploring over 20 psychedelic compounds.

Psychedelics as Tools: Reflections After 20+ Compounds and a Decade of Experiments

A discussion on techniques available to overcome semantic errors in syntax when generating dialect-specific SQL

AI SQL Generation: Overcoming dialect-specific syntax errors

From mathematical proofs to biological discoveries, AI is connecting ideas across disciplines, bringing new scale to Don Swanson's "undiscovered public knowledge".

Quasi-Riemann, Biologic Discovery, and Swanson's "Undiscovered Public Knowledge"

As LLMs write more code, contracts and effect systems become essential tools for constraining behavior, exposing side effects, and verifying implementations.

Design by Contract and effects are essential for LLM-generated code

I spent ages 14-16 in a maximum-security juvenile prison, became a felon at 19, lost almost everything to addiction, and later rebuilt my life through software, open source, and a few people who took a chance on me. This is the condensed story, written for anyone wondering whether they have a future.

Building from Zero After Addiction, Prison, and a Felony

The next data platform may be less about storing data and more about deciding what AI agents should know, trust, and act on.

The Race to Become the Context Layer for Agents

Using Linux's memfd_create(2) syscall to load shared libraries and execute binaries entirely from memory, bypassing noexec restrictions without ever touching disk.

Bypassing noexec with memfd_create(2)

A tutorial on how to use Java's new Record Patterns feature to write powerful, concise pattern matching code for usecases like AST transformations and rewrite-rules in compiler passes.


What good are Record Patterns in Java? An example based on Spark's Catalyst Optimizer and it's Tree Rewriting Rules

A dual-purpose tutorial to 1) Demonstrate how to implement the Simple Query Protocol, where Java is an implementation detail; 2) Show practical examples of most of the new features since JDK 17, including Records, Sealed Types, Pattern Matching for Switch, Virtual Threads, and Panama Foreign-Function & Memory API.


Building a PostgreSQL Wire Protocol Server using Vanilla, Modern Java 21

Design-by-Contract's invariant attribute allows you to enforce important properties of systems and data structures, making it an incredibly useful tool for developers. In this blog post, we'll be exploring the development of a GCC plugin that adds support for [[invariant]] conditions in C++ classes and structs. We'll also be looking at an example of how invariant can be used to improve the integrity of a Stack data structure. This is especially timely as GCC has recently added support for Contracts, allowing you to annotate functions with pre/post conditions. Don't miss out on learning how to use this powerful feature in your own projects!


Adding Design-by-Contract [[invariant]] conditions to C++, via a GCC plugin

A reflection on the impact of language models like Github Copilot on the experience on authoring software and the role of the developer

A Day Without a Copilot: Reflections on Copilot-Driven Development

In this post, we will explore how to build a high-performance database buffer pool in Zig using io_uring's new fixed-buffer mode.

Building a high-performance database buffer pool in Zig using io_uring's new fixed-buffer mode

An overview of how the Panama Foreign Memory API can be useful outside of foreign/native applications

Panama: Not-so-Foreign Memory. Using MemorySegment as a high-performance ByteBuffer replacement.

A tutorial on building a Query Expression Language/AST in Kotlin and implementing SQL generation

All Posts

Disposable Software: When generating code costs less than finding it

The Absurdity of the term "AI Engineer"

Experimenting with SQL:2023 Property-Graph Queries in Postgres 18

Psychedelics as Tools: Reflections After 20+ Compounds and a Decade of Experiments

AI SQL Generation: Overcoming dialect-specific syntax errors