Recent Posts

• Updating my Résumé Like It's 1989 — (Or, Maximalist PDF generation with Nix, Make, Emacs, and LaTeX) — I realized recently that it had been five years since I updated my résumé. Because I am totally normal and reasonable utterly deranged, I decided to do a reasonable amount of work create an org-mode to LaTeX to PDF pipeline, and then to use nix to reproducibly build my résumé into this very website. Follow along, and I'll try to keep this brief :)
• TIL tree Can Output HTML — TIL that the tree utility on most (all?) unixes can, instead of printing your directory tree to stdout, make a nice little HTML doc for you instead.
• Async Rust Patterns: Stream Owned Receiver — A quick summary of a neat pattern I have found myself falling back on again and again in async Rust programming, in which a struct wrapping an owned Receiver provides one pure method that takes ownership and converts the object into a stream, and another that consumes the stream forever, making for easy testing and easy configuration of concurrent/parallel processing.
• Wireguard VPN Configuration for NixOS — Setting up a local NixOS headless server to route all traffic through a VPN via WireGuard, while still allowing local traffic on specific ports for SSH et al.
• Y'all Need to Read Something Other than Tech Blogs — The state of tech blogging is abysmal. Even posts I suspect of being human-authored are acquiring an style reminiscent of generative AI. I suspect this is because people read so much LLM-produced drivel that they subconsciously mimic it. As someone who is offended by the very idea of content presented as being human-authored that is in fact written by a machine, this is a plea to please read something, anything, other than tech blogs, to sow a more diverse set of patterns in the fertile soil of your mind.
• Manual Record Sharding for High-Performance Updates in Postgres — UPDATE is a dangerous operation in a high-throughput postgres database, and so it is often best to prefer an insert-only schema. But of course there is no free lunch, and an insert-only schema comes with drawbacks of its own. In this post, we talk about a simple mechanism for manually sharding rows in order to enable high-frequency updates for certain kinds of data. This method is especially useful in maintaining aggregate data and allows for significantly improved SELECT query performance when accessing the data post insert/update.
• A Zero Downtime Migration to Time-Partitioned Tables in Postgres — A crosspost from our engineering blog at work, in which I describe how we managed to migrate databases receiving millions of writes per day to time-partitioned tables without incurring any downtime or performance degradations.
• Amtrak Tips — A collection of tips and tricks for riding Amtrak
• TIL: use svn to download subdirectory of GitHub repo — Today I learned this one weird trick to download a single subdirectory from a github repo, without needing to add the repo as a remote, do a spare checkout, or any of the other typical workarounds.
• A NixOS Christmas Story — A quick story of how NixOS saved Christmas