Backlinks 2021-05-19 grule tries to implement ideas from JBoss Drools in a more Go-like way. I’ve never personally found a need for such a Rules Engine, but the continued existence of these things shows that someone is finding value from them.

Novelty means severity Dylan Morris has an essay in Zeynep Tufecki’s Insight newsletter about COVID-19 and how Novelty Means Severity is the key to the pandemic, because SARS-CoV-2 is a novel virus (one our immune systems haven’t seen before): Unless we eradicate SARS-CoV-2—possible but not likely, …

Half a million lines of Go My latest blog post about Khan Academy’s move from Python 2 to Go reflects on our experience with Go after writing 500,000+ lines of it. I posted it on Thursday, but it showed up on Hacker News today. It also got comments in r/programming and r/golang. traVRsal traVRsal lets you …

Backlinks 2021-05-16 Looking for some light Fantasy reading? There are a bunch of recommendations in this Reddit thread about non-violent fantasy authors/books/series. 2020-05-23 I enjoy reading (and writing) Fantasy, and I have never gotten around to reading Discworld. I plan to start soon. This Discworld Reading …

Backlinks 2021-05-16 My latest blog post about Khan Academy’s move from Python 2 to Go reflects on our experience with Go after writing 500,000+ lines of it. 2020-05-11 Today marks five years since I joined Khan Academy. Thanks to all of my coworkers for providing a great working environment, and to Sal for …

Backlinks 2021-05-16 I am not someone you’d come to for Photography tips, so I’ll link to helpful resources. Wired has an article with tips about taking a good self-portrait using just your smartphone camera.

A question that comes up frequently when our engineering blog posts circulate: Why does Khan Academy have so much code? The latest iteration of this came up when I wrote up the engineering team’s reflections on having written 500,000 lines of Go. Here’s my response to this question: People start by looking …

Local-first development I find Local First data storage to be an interesting and complex topic. For many kinds of apps, this is the ideal way to build it. But building local first apps is hard, as noted by Andy Matuschak. That thread is full of interesting bits, including flushout, “a distributed data model based …

Backlinks 2021-05-15 I find Local First data storage to be an interesting and complex topic. For many kinds of apps, this is the ideal way to build it. But building local first apps is hard, as noted by Andy Matuschak. That thread is full of interesting bits, including flushout, “a distributed data model based …

A Star Wars Day TikTok TikTok makes remixing easy and people do all kinds of wacky things with it, including this guy introducing his girlfriend on Star Wars Day. Maybe we need masks indoors just a bit longer Zeynep Tufecki wrote just the other day about how the CDC was being timid with their approach to COVID-19. Now, …