Viewing profile — bguthrie

Hey HN! I enjoy writing, but find the act of driving a piece to completion taxing and occasionally paralyzing, and I'm unsatisfied with the quality of work that LLMs produce alone …

His wife was a professor at the Northeastern computer science department when I went there. A wonderful teacher.

I hadn't realized Zed was built from the ground up to support collaborative programming. I liked it already, and I like it even more now.

The problem with no collaboration is that it can lead to fragility . Context transfer is costly, but without it work bottlenecks around key individuals. When those individuals are …

This was before Git! (Subversion had its meager charms.) Even after Git became widespread, some infra teams were uncomfortable installing a dev tool like Git on production systems,…

I was working on Rails apps before AMIs or Heroku.

My recollection is that this is what many Capistrano setups were doing under the covers. Capistrano was just an orchestration framework for executing commands across multiple machi…

I've been writing Rails code since 2007. There's a reason the stack has gotten more complicated with time, and virtually no team has ever done it right by this definition. The trou…

I spoke to the authors of this database while running my last startup about the exact problem this sets out to solve—the need for time-travel features in particular domains (versio…

I reviewed the article in question and have a little more color to add for some of the skeptics commenting below. Advocates of pre-merge review point out (correctly) that peer revi…

I use Scala frequently for internal microservices development. I also write a fair amount of Clojure. I believe that a lot of good and robust software is built in Scala, but that i…

I think that talking about a 10x engineer or 0.5x engineer misses the right optimization: good software is built in teams, so build a strong team. Cross-skilling, pairing, and bloc…

Cursive is an excellent way to write Clojure and has improved my workflow tremendously. Highly recommended; I bought a license. Congratulations to Colin on a 1.0 release.

I'm not clear what technique this article is trying to describe, but anyone that spends two weeks pre-writing tests is not performing TDD. That simply isn't how it works. The cycle…

I remember working out of the same office as these guys back when they were just getting started, and their success and impact has been truly amazing. Recognition well deserved.

Exception handling is currently my biggest complaint with core.async, and I've gained a fair amount of sympathy for the idea of encapsulating asynchronous operations inside an obje…

Many demonstrably innocent people are indicted and convicted with far less evidence than a video. Nonetheless, for other cases I grant the point.