Teaching Claude to QA a mobile app
“When life looks like Easy Street, there is danger at your door” — Grateful Dead, “Uncle John’s Band” (A note on picking this quote: I asked Claude to find me a Grateful Dead lyric that fit the theme. It couldn’t — searching for “dead lyrics” triggers the content filtering policy: API Error: 400 {”type”:”error”,”error”:{”type”:”invalid_request_error”,”message”:”Output blocked […]
The gold standard of optimization: A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon
The gold standard of optimization: A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon Due to some lucky circumstances, I recently had the chance to appear in one of the biggest German gaming podcasts, Stay Forever, to talk about the technology of RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999). It was a great interview, and I strongly recommend to listen to […]
PC Gamer Recommends RSS Readers in a 37MB Article That Just Keeps Downloading
There’s not much worth quoting in this PC Gamer article but I do want to draw your attention to three things. First, what you see when you navigate to the page: a notification popup, a newsletter popup that obscures the article, and a dimmed background with at least five visible ads. Welcome Mat Second, once […]
OpenClaw Is a Security Nightmare Dressed Up as a Daydream
Back in 2023, the internet was buzzing about AutoGPT and BabyAGI. It was just after GPT-4 had arrived. Everyone was talking about autonomous agents taking jobs, how they can, and I remember how scared and paranoid people looked. However, they didn’t stand up to their promise. The conversations died off in a few weeks. Fast […]
Why I love NixOS
22 Mar 2026 What I love about NixOS has less to do with Linux and more to do with the Nix package manager. To me, NixOS is the operating system artifact of a much more important idea: a deterministic and reproducible functional package manager. That is the core of why I love NixOS. It is […]
Five Years of Running a Systems Reading Group at Microsoft
March 2026 I started a reading group in 2021, a few months after joining Microsoft as a new grad on the Azure Databases team. The group was initially focused on database internals, which was my favorite subject at UW. Databases touch so many areas of CS: compiler construction in the query engine, memory management with […]
MAUI Is Coming to Linux
Alongside Avalonia 12 and the .NET 11 Previews, I am pleased to announce the first preview of our Avalonia backend for .NET MAUI. Now, you can leverage Avalonia to deploy .NET MAUI apps to new platforms, like Linux and WebAssembly. Since last fall, we’ve made great strides in bringing the power of Avalonia to .NET […]
Two Studies in Compiler Optimisations
Table of contents Introduction While many performance-oriented programmers are intimately acquainted with the almost preternatural ability of modern compilers to optimise their code, and many of us have spent countless hours on Compiler Explorer examining the differences between the Assembly generated by different versions of gcc and clang, most have likely not looked under the […]
A Coherent Vision for the Future of Version Control
I’m releasing Manyana, a project which I believe presents a coherent vision for the future of version control — and a compelling case for building it. It’s based on the fundamentally sound approach of using CRDTs for version control, which is long overdue but hasn’t happened yet because of subtle UX issues. A CRDT merge […]
I Hate: Programming Wayland Applications
A quick introduction: If you want to program a graphical application for linux, your primary choices are using either X11 or Wayland. According to Wikipedia, X11 had its first release in 1984. X11 follows a client-server-model. I assume it’s because the whole computational environment, was very different back then. If you have a central server […]