Posts
TigerBeetle and NASA reliability
Published:Oct. 31, 2024 Last time I posted I talked about Erlang and how it has built-in error recovery to maintain reliable systems. Erlang's error recovery is based on monitoring processes and automatically restarting subsystems to a known good state when a process fails. This happens at the cost of any data inside of the restarted processes. The built-in error recovery allows Erlang to keep functioning even in the face of errors, network partitions, and bugs. It's an interesting paradigm since it approaches the problem differently than more traditional "try/catch what you can and crash otherwise" mentality…Venture into Erlang
Published:Jun. 28, 2024 Recently I've been exploring Erlang and the OTP. As I've been trying things out, some aspects of the design Erlang and the OTP have finally started to click. I'm writing this blog post about my experiences with Erlang and the OTP so far…A return to Clojure
Published:Jun. 15, 2024 Recently I started using Clojure again. It's been a while since I've used it. I'm recording my thoughts and impressions as I get back to using it. The experience doesn't feel like it changed much over the past few years, which is both good and bad. This is more of a post of my thoughts rather than having a clear direction…A journey across editors
Published:Feb. 17, 2024 Often I hear developer journeys through the programming languages they used or the companies they worked for. Sometimes it's told through frameworks learned or projects released or mistakes made. I'll probably tell my story a few times using some of those common methods. But today I thought I'd do something different. Instead of telling it in languages learned or frameworks worked with, I'm going to tell it in editors I used…A site for my experiments
Published:Feb. 1, 2024 I recently created a website which holds a lot of my experiments. Some of these experiments either make it into my blog or they form the basis of some of my blog posts. Many of them don't make it into my blog posts. Instead of just letting them sit in the dark, I decided to put some of them on an experiments site…C++ to JavaScript with Cheerp
Published:Jan. 7, 2024 Lately I've been exploring different ways to make C and C++ code run in the web browser. I compiled one of my C/C++ libraries to WASM with Emscripten and Embind (details in Chapter ). I also made a maze program in C and SDL2 and got that working via Emscripten. Emscripten is great, but it only compiles to WASM…Creating a WASM Library with Embind
Published:Dec. 13, 2023 I've been working on my Test Jam project for a while. I had previously tried to do a WASM wrapper around my C/C++ build, but I ran into a memory leak which existed outside the C/C++ code. Instead of reading the manual, I rewrote the code in TypeScript. After the rewrite, I read the manual and learned what was the source of the leak. I then rebuilt my WASM wrapper and ended up with a TypeScript and WASM implementation. I then decided to start comparing the two implementations to see what the benefits and drawbacks are. I also wanted to test some well touted claims about WASM (e.g. performance, code reuse) in the context of a library. So I started poking and prodding, and then I created this post…Overview of globally unique identifiers
Published:Dec. 2, 2023 Recently I saw that CUID, a way to generate unique IDs, had been deprecated due to security concerns. That got me really curious. I haven't ever thought of IDs as being "secure." Instead, I've always treated them as untrusted, public-knowledge values. I've always built access controls around my IDs, even when they were randomly generated GUIDs. So I started looking at a lot of ID generators to see if this concept of "secure ids" really did exist, what meant, and what other properties IDs had…Unsigned Integers in JavaScript
Published:Nov. 30, 2023 Lately I've been experimenting with creating random data generators in TypeScript. I wanted to avoid using the global random number generator Math.random since I wanted my generators to be fully determinitic (i.e. if you give them the same input, they will always return the same output). I also wanted a seed to be passed in every time, which meant that I'd be creating a new generator every time…Writing a Property test library
Published:Nov. 28, 2023 In a previous post I talked about property testing (see ). In that post, I discussed the difference between property tests and more traditional example-based testing, how to write property tests, and the shortcomings of property tests. If you'd like to learn more about property testing, then go give that article a read…