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Articles & Rants
Every now and then I write up my thoughts on the projects I'm building and how the way I work has
changed over the years. Nothing official, just one programmer's opinion. 12 articles and counting.
Setting Up loony-postgres: Migrations Without the Boilerplate
Posted May 2026 |
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Database migrations are the one place I'm cautious about how much I automate. loony-postgres
holds the schema and migration scripts for my other projects, and while I'll happily let an
assistant draft the boilerplate CREATE TABLE statements, I read every constraint and every
index by hand before it touches a real database. Vibe coding a web handler that's wrong costs you a
bug report. Vibe coding a migration that's wrong costs you data. Different risk, different amount
of trust.
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Building jsonparser in C: The Old-Fashioned Way
Posted May 2026 |
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Before I'd touched a single AI coding tool, I wrote jsonparser from scratch in C - no
libraries, no shortcuts, just a hand-rolled lexer and a recursive-descent parser fighting me the
whole way. I remember the exact bug that cost me an entire evening: a missing null check after a
malloc that only broke on deeply nested arrays. There's a particular kind of understanding
you only get from that kind of pain. I'm not precious about it - I wouldn't write another JSON
parser by hand today just to prove a point - but I'm glad I did this one that way. It's the reason
I can look at generated parsing code now and immediately tell if it's doing something dumb.
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google-cloud: Automating the Boring Cloud Stuff
Posted March 2026 |
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google-cloud is a grab-bag of Rust tooling I use to talk to GCP without hand-writing the
same request-signing and retry logic in every project. This is peak vibe-coding territory for me -
cloud SDK glue code is necessary, rarely interesting, and extremely well-documented, which means an
AI assistant gets it right most of the time. I spent maybe two hours on the whole thing where the
old, purely-hand-typed version of me would have burned a full weekend fighting authentication
headers. That's two hours I got to spend on the parts of my other projects that actually needed me.
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cargo-setup: The Tiny Repo That Saves Me an Hour Every Project
Posted November 2025 |
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cargo-setup is barely a project - it's a scaffolding script that sets up the lint config,
CI skeleton, and directory layout I use for every new Rust repo. I vibe-coded it in about twenty
minutes because it's exactly the kind of repetitive, low-stakes task where I don't need to
understand every line, I just need it to work the same way every time. It's saved me more
cumulative time than almost anything else on this list, precisely because it's so unglamorous.
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since March 3, 1998
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