Linklog

Interesting links from around the web.

2026

June 22, 2026 · buildkite.com

Goodbye to sequential integers, hello UUIDv7!

Why Buildkite moved its primary keys to UUIDv7, which keeps the global uniqueness of a UUID while staying time-ordered enough to sit well in a B-tree index.
June 22, 2026 · sandimetz.com

The Wrong Abstraction

The case for un-abstracting: once a shared abstraction starts collecting special cases and flags, inlining it back into plain duplication is cheaper than bending it further.
June 19, 2026 · planetscale.com

B-trees and database indexes

Sizes a B-tree node to a disk page and walks the math from there, showing why the primary key you choose sets how many pages every query has to read.
June 19, 2026 · evanjones.ca

Why databases use ordered indexes but programming uses hash tables

Hash tables win the single-lookup benchmark, yet databases default to B-trees. The payoff is everything past that one lookup: range scans, sorted reads, and maintaining many indexes at once.
June 19, 2026 · use-the-index-luke.com

On Uber's Choice of Databases

A point-by-point rebuttal of Uber's famous 'we left Postgres for MySQL' post, arguing the problems were specific to how they used it, not a verdict on the database.
May 13, 2026 · matklad.github.io

Learning Software Architecture

matklad on where architectural taste really comes from: reading large codebases closely and noticing which decisions kept them soft enough to change.
February 24, 2026 · martinfowler.com

Knowledge Priming

If you feed the LLM your project's architecture and conventions before asking it to write code, the output gets dramatically better, and here's what to include and what to skip.
January 31, 2026 · nadh.in

Code is cheap. Show me the talk.

Torvalds said 'talk is cheap, show me the code,' but now that machines can generate code, the person who can clearly articulate the problem is the one who matters.
January 29, 2026 · martinfowler.com

Feature Toggles (aka Feature Flags)

Feature flags are just if-statements with an expiration date, and the real problem is that most teams forget to clean them up.
January 26, 2026 · gwern.net

First, Make Me Care

If you start with background, people leave before they reach the interesting part, so find the one thing that makes your reader curious and open with that.
January 21, 2026 · seangoedecke.com

I'm addicted to being useful

Being endlessly useful feels virtuous and carries a cost: saying yes to everyone else's priorities is how you keep dodging the harder work that's actually your own.
January 18, 2026 · alexharri.com

ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

ASCII characters have shapes, not just brightness values, and once you match on geometry instead of treating them as pixels the rendering quality jumps dramatically.
January 09, 2026 · mihaileric.com

The Emperor Has No Clothes: How to Code Claude Code in 200 Lines

AI coding assistants are basically a REPL that calls an LLM in a loop, and once you see the 200 lines that make it work, the magic disappears.
January 05, 2026 · addyosmani.com

21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google

After 14 years at Google, the lessons that stuck aren't about code, they're about navigating ambiguity, building trust, and the difference between being productive and being impactful.
January 05, 2026 · joelonsoftware.com

The Law of Leaky Abstractions

You can pretend the layer below doesn't exist right up until it breaks, and then you'd better understand it anyway.
January 05, 2026 · karpathy.ai

Neural Networks: Zero To Hero

You implement backprop, attention, and a GPT from scratch with no frameworks, and by the end you actually understand what the machine is doing instead of just calling library functions.
January 04, 2026 · martin.kleppmann.com

Accounting for Computer Scientists

Kleppmann explains double-entry bookkeeping as a data model, letting a programmer read a balance sheet as a graph of money moving between accounts.

2025

December 31, 2025 · medium.com

Reactivity in Angular

Angular's change detection gets a lot simpler once you understand that immutability lets the framework skip entire subtrees instead of diffing every object property.
December 25, 2025 · karpathy.bearblog.dev

2025 LLM Year in Review

Karpathy's dense, opinionated survey of everything that changed in language models over 2025, written by someone who has built these systems himself.
December 25, 2025 · devblogs.microsoft.com

An amusing story about a practical use of the null garbage collector

If the process is about to exit, the correct garbage collection strategy is to do nothing, because the OS will reclaim everything faster than you ever could.
December 24, 2025 · jalammar.github.io

The Illustrated Transformer

The clearest visual explanation of how Transformers actually work, from self-attention to positional encodings, now referenced by courses at Stanford, Harvard, and MIT.
December 04, 2025 · humanlayer.dev

Writing a good CLAUDE.md

The CLAUDE.md is the highest-leverage file in an agent-assisted repo. Writing a good one is mostly subtraction: keep the few instructions that change behavior, cut the rest.
October 26, 2025 · pomb.us

Build your own React

Rewrite React from scratch following the real architecture, and suddenly the rules about hooks and re-renders stop being arbitrary and start being obvious.
August 31, 2025 · github.com

Cognitive Load is what matters

Most codebases aren't hard because the problem is hard, they're hard because someone made you hold too many things in your head at once.
August 29, 2025 · samwho.dev

Big O

Big-O taught through visual intuition first, with interactive animations that show how each complexity class scales before any notation appears.
August 27, 2025 · cstack.github.io

How Does a Database Work?

Build a SQLite clone from scratch in C, and after that you'll never write a SELECT statement without knowing exactly what the machine is doing underneath.
August 19, 2025 · youtube.com

Concurrency is not Parallelism

Concurrency is how you organize the work, parallelism is whether you have enough workers to do it simultaneously, and most people mix the two up.
August 19, 2025 · seangoedecke.com

Everything I know about good system design

Practical system design advice from someone who builds systems, not someone selling interview prep, focused on knowing your actual bottleneck and when not to distribute.
July 25, 2025 · journal.stuffwithstuff.com

What Color is Your Function?

Once you make one function async, every function that calls it has to be async too, and that's not a bug, it's a language design problem nobody solved cleanly.
July 22, 2025 · granola.ai

Don't animate height!

Animating height forces the browser to recalculate layout every single frame, and here are the concrete alternatives that don't.
July 05, 2025 · ordep.dev

Writing Code Was Never The Bottleneck

LLMs made writing code faster but the hard part was never typing, it was understanding the problem, and that part hasn't gotten any easier.
June 17, 2025 · storage.googleapis.com

Maglev: A Fast and Reliable Software Network Load Balancer

Google's paper on how they load-balance all their incoming traffic with consistent hashing, kernel bypass, and no shared state between balancer machines.
June 12, 2025 · eli.thegreenplace.net

How debuggers work: Part 1 - Basics

When you set a breakpoint, the debugger literally overwrites your instruction with a trap, and the rest of the trick is just ptrace and knowing when to put the original byte back.
May 25, 2025 · endler.dev

Reinvent the Wheel

Sometimes writing it yourself is the right call because the dependency you avoided understanding will eventually break, and then you'll have to understand it anyway under pressure.
May 24, 2025 · paulgraham.com

Good Writing

Paul Graham's short, opinionated take on what makes writing good, worth re-reading every time you sit down to write a design doc or blog post.
May 03, 2025 · 250bpm.substack.com

Accountability Sinks

When nobody in the organization is responsible for a bad outcome, that's not an accident, somebody designed it that way.
April 28, 2025 · dev.to

The Evolution of Signals in JavaScript

A decade of frontend reactivity told by one of its architects, tracing how framework after framework converged on signals for fine-grained updates.
April 25, 2025 · meaningness.com

Seriously bright light vs. winter blahs

A well-researched deep dive into how SAD lights work and what “lumens” really mean - great for cutting through marketing hype.
April 24, 2025 · aerotwist.com

The Anatomy of a Frame

Every frame your browser paints goes through the same pipeline, and most performance bugs come from accidentally triggering expensive stages you didn't need to.
April 24, 2025 · browser.engineering

Web Browser Engineering

A free book that has you build a working browser in Python, from raw socket to render tree, until no part of the pipeline stays a black box.
April 23, 2025 · blog.markshead.com

State Machines – Basics of Computer Science

If you're managing state with a pile of boolean flags, you've already built a state machine, just a buggy one without a diagram.
April 22, 2025 · web.dev

How browsers work

The most thorough single reference on everything that happens between typing a URL and seeing pixels, and it's held up since 2011.
April 22, 2025 · developer.chrome.com

Inside look at modern web browser

Chrome's own team explains why your browser runs a separate process for each tab and what actually happens at the OS level when you click a link.
April 22, 2025 · jakearchibald.com

Tasks, Microtasks, Queues and Schedules

Why a promise callback runs before a setTimeout of zero. Archibald walks the event loop's two queues closely enough that async ordering stops surprising you.
April 22, 2025 · gist.github.com

What Forces Layout / Reflow

The reference list of the exact DOM reads and writes that force a synchronous layout. Keep it nearby and you'll stop triggering reflows inside loops by accident.
April 20, 2025 · oneusefulthing.org

On Jagged AGI

Model ability is jagged rather than a single line you cross; the system that aces a hard task can fail a trivial one, which makes 'is it AGI yet' the wrong question.
April 17, 2025 · youtube.com

The spelled-out intro to neural networks: building micrograd

Karpathy builds an autograd engine from nothing, one line at a time, until backprop is something you could re-derive yourself instead of a formula you take on faith.
April 10, 2025 · kaggle.com

Prompt Engineering

Most prompt advice is vibes. This whitepaper is the opposite - it breaks down why few-shot examples work, when chain-of-thought actually helps, and where most people over-engineer their prompts.
April 05, 2025 · joshcollinsworth.com

The blissful zen of a good side project

The best side projects aren't the ones that become startups. They're the ones where nobody's waiting on a PR review and the only deadline is whenever you feel like it.
April 03, 2025 · thirty-five.com

Overengineered anchor links

Scroll-to-anchor seems trivial until you account for sticky headers, the back button, smooth scrolling race conditions, and intersection observer timing.
March 29, 2025 · refactoringenglish.com

How to Write Blog Posts that Developers Read

What separates dev posts people finish from ones they abandon: earning the click in the first few lines, then cutting the throat-clearing that makes readers leave.
March 27, 2025 · anthropic.com

Tracing the Thoughts of a Large Language Model

Anthropic's interpretability team looks inside the model and catches it planning several words ahead and reasoning in a concept space shared across languages.
March 20, 2025 · craftinginterpreters.com

Crafting Interpreters

Two complete interpreters for one small language, one written for clarity and one for speed, after which compilers stop reading as wizardry.
March 20, 2025 · polotek.net

The Frontend Treadmill

The framework you pick matters far less than knowing it deeply; chasing rewrites rarely reaches the promised land, it just resets the treadmill.
March 11, 2025 · haseebq.com

Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer

The negotiation guide most engineers are never taught: you hold more leverage than you feel, nearly everything is negotiable, and you never name the first number.
March 11, 2025 · simonwillison.net

My approach to running a link blog

Willison's method for a link blog worth following: never post a bare URL, always quote the source and add the one sentence of context only you can write.
March 01, 2025 · autodidacts.io

Troubleshooting: The Skill That Never Goes Obsolete

Tools change; the method of systematically cornering the cause of a fault does not. A case for treating troubleshooting as a discipline you practice on purpose.
February 26, 2025 · youtube.com

TypeScript types can run DOOM

Someone implemented DOOM entirely in TypeScript's type system - no runtime, just the compiler crunching frames. It's the most unhinged proof that TS types are Turing-complete you'll ever see.
February 21, 2025 · buttondown.com

Five Kinds of Nondeterminism

'Nondeterministic' is doing the work of five different words, and Hillel Wayne pulls them apart so you can name which one is behind your flaky test.
February 20, 2025 · incompleteideas.net

The Bitter Lesson

We want AI agents that can discover like we can, not which contain what we have discovered. Building in our discoveries only makes it harder to see how the discovering process can be done.
February 17, 2025 · harper.blog

My LLM codegen workflow atm

LLMs for software development offers a refreshing roadmap. By brainstorming extensively upfront, then iterating in small steps with careful testing, you can make quick progress without sacrificing maintainability. It’s a practical look at how to harness AI tools effectively, especially for creating clean, well-structured projects from scratch.
February 10, 2025 · henrikkarlsson.xyz

Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

Write from what's odd about you. Karlsson reframes a blog as a long-running search query that routes the people who share your obsessions to your inbox.
February 09, 2025 · antirez.com

Reasoning models are just LLMs

antirez argues reasoning models are nothing exotic, just the same next-token predictors trained to spend more tokens thinking before they commit to an answer.
February 08, 2025 · oreilly.com

The End of Programming as We Know It

O'Reilly takes the long view, noting that every generation declared programming dead when the abstraction had only risen a level, and AI is the next rise.
February 05, 2025 · chriskiehl.com

Software development topics I've changed my mind on after 10 years

A decade of reversed opinions from someone still in the trenches, where most of the certainties you pick up as a junior prove to be context-dependent.
January 25, 2025 · slatestarcodex.com

Nonfiction Writing Advice

Do-this-not-that writing advice you can apply mid-draft, from breaking up walls of text to leading with the concrete example over the abstract claim.
January 25, 2025 · benkuhn.net

Searching for outliers

When the outcomes that matter are outlier-driven, optimizing the average is the wrong game; take many cheap shots and filter hard for maybe-amazing over reliably-fine.
January 24, 2025 · blog.railway.com

So You Want to Build Your Own Data Center

A field report on leaving the cloud for your own racks, where the job resembles construction far more than writing a Terraform file.

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