I'm an educator, a sound editor, a sound artist, geek, nerd, student, mentor, lover of horror films, music and so much more
Charleston
Joined August 2008
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brbrown retweeted
Good reminder to avoid compiling regular expressions from unrestricted user input whenever you can. Even setting RCE aside, ReDoS is a real risk with backtracking engines. If you must, quote the input, use a linear-time engine like RE2, or bound match time.
Ruby’s turn 😅
Remember the GitLab bug? Well now it moved upstream into Ruby.
Multiple 10.0 CRITICAL exploits.
Patch now 🚨
Happy Friday 🤠
ruby-lang.org/en/news/2026/1…
brbrown retweeted
21 people, a single meeting a week, no quarterly goals, no pull requests, no mandatory code review, no titles (except one dictator), a hundred releases a day, bugs fixed in minutes, famous for killing features.
@sqs and @thorstenball on how the Amp team works:
brbrown retweeted
One issue in realizing AI productivity gains in software projects is that AI is breaking our ability to estimate software projects.
The truism that every project will expand to fill the time allocated is 100% true. The solution was to make teams estimate timeframes and then try to stick to it. The team always underestimates the time they need, which created a forcing function to make the project actually pull together and finish the hard thing.
But in the last year I think we’ve seen a > 100% speed up in software productivity. Managers and senior engineers are still internalizing it. The result is that project estimates are very lax. And as a result we don’t realize the full effect of the productivity because we have unintentionally padded schedules.
The unlock for software productivity is realizing how much faster things are and expecting that pace.
brbrown retweeted
The purpose of estimating software projects is not business planning its to create a self imposed deadline that creates social pressure for teams to finish the project.
This sounds insane. When I was an engineer I hated estimation and deadlines. My feeling was, it will be done when it’s done and we don’t know when it will be done. I would obnoxiously give a probability distribution whenever asked if we would ship on time.
But in reality, in a complex project with many people or teams, people need a good deadline, one that is aggressive but not insane. This is what lets everyone involved solve for what really matters, cut things that don’t matter, and push to complete something really hard.
It’s a silly social convention, but it really helps. In fact setting aggressive but not insane deadlines, slipping them when needed but holding them when possible, is one of the key capabilities in engineering management.
There’s a kind of polite fiction at the heart of the software industry.
ALT There’s a kind of polite fiction at the heart of the software industry. It goes something like this: Estimating how long software projects will take is very hard, but not impossible. A skilled engineering team can, with time and effort, learn how long it will take for them to deliver work, which will in turn allow their organization to make good business plans. This is, of course, false. As every experienced software engineer knows, it is not possible to accurately estimate software projects. The tension between this polite fiction and its well-understood falseness causes a lot of strange activity in tech companies.
ALT For instance, many engineering teams estimate work in t-shirt sizes instead of time, because it just feels too obviously silly to the engineers in question to give direct time estimates. Naturally, these t-shirt sizes are immediately translated into hours and days when the estimates make their way up the management chain. Alternatively, software engineers who are genuinely trying to give good time estimates have ridiculous heuristics like “double your initial estimate and add 20%“. This is basically the same as giving up and saying “just estimate everything at a month”. Should tech companies just stop estimating? One of my guiding principles is that when a tech company is doing something silly, they’re probably doing it for a good reason. In other words, practices that appear to not make sense are often serving some more basic, illegible role in the organization. So what is the actual purpose of estimation, and how can you do it well as a software engineer?
brbrown retweeted
I often get emails from junior engineers asking me what to do.
Here's what I just wrote to one of them
brbrown retweeted
🥳 Woot, woot, finishing the week on a high note: #Hardwood can now write Parquet files directly to S3, with parts uploading in the background while you write. Just missed 1.1.0.Beta2, so it'll ship in CR1 shortly. Big thanks to Chandan Dhamande!
hardwood.dev/dev/how-to/writ…
brbrown retweeted
Great time in Berlin! Today at @scaladays, @danielciocirlan and I presented our new web framework called eezo. Model routes and entities using #Scala case classes and derivation.
Drop us a ⭐️ on GitHub and contribute!
Here is the site 🌐: eezo.io/
brbrown retweeted
Powered by OSC7501! The implementation seems obvious, but @almonk went into the dungeon for weeks toiling over TINY details around when exactly to show different UI states and it feels amazing.
Everyone at Superlogical all agreed we've never used any activity inbox in any context before because they're all too noisy or degrade to "email but worse" (e.g. GitHub notifications). So our benchmark was: can we build an activity inbox that we actually use?
Like I said, on the surface I think this visually looks unsurprising, but its not as simple as "program has activity lets show an attention icon." Lots of heuristics and other signals as input to decide what exactly to show when.
This is also the first task in the 4 months of Superlogical existening that I've seen Al say "this is hard." The man was sweating over this one.
SO FAR, this one is passing the test and testers so far seem very pleased. But we're still iterating hard.
New for Rex testers. 👁️ Activity Mode shows you active and idling processes and agents for quick context switching, and some extra metadata.
We're working our way slowly through the waitlist. Our priority is building quality software, so we're admitting testers in batches of 50 or 100 at the moment and addressing any feedback with the group before adding the next wave.
brbrown retweeted
Like it or not, modern sw engineering is no longer done without LLMs (AI) and will no longer be done without.
Whoever doesn’t want to use AI, no problem: but you won’t be hired at 99.9% of startups+Big Tech+ambitious companies, even today
It’s as part of sw dev as the keyboard
🗞️ if your team is too busy doing their 'normal job' to experiment with AI, you're preparing them to be replaced
ghuntley.com/replaced/
In this post, I guess this's the last time I'll say it. AI use is no longer optional if you wish to be employed. What follows is advice for current employees and hiring managers on how to hire in 2026 to source AI-first candidates.
brbrown retweeted
So many folks sleep on the sheer throughput of a warmed-up JVM. Yes, time to peak performance is a real cost. But for any long-running service it's noise, and with Leyden’s AOT work, the warm-up time gets smaller and smaller.
brbrown retweeted
📺 Woot, woot, the recording from my talk about Hardwood at @Devoxx is available on YouTube now.
youtube.com/watch?v=6mzvcPr3…
brbrown retweeted
48 hours to Claude Code support. ty @AnthropicAI
Claude Code v2.1.295 supports OSC 7501 (program status). Incredible speed @AnthropicAI supporting this protocol which will help hundreds or thousands of downstream applications! They had access to Rex and verified through Rex it works. 🥰
brbrown retweeted
Claude Code v2.1.295 supports OSC 7501 (program status). Incredible speed @AnthropicAI supporting this protocol which will help hundreds or thousands of downstream applications! They had access to Rex and verified through Rex it works. 🥰
brbrown retweeted
I've published a new, general-purpose terminal specification that gives any program a way to tell the terminal what it's doing: idle, working, waiting, finished, or failed, and why. It is easy to implement on both sides. I've written more about why: mitchellh.com/writing/progra…
The problem this solves is generic and applies in compelling ways to all sorts of use cases (e.g. package managers, build tools), but it really rears a hideous head when it comes to AI and the "agentic inbox" problem.
I found over 250 different agent orchestrators (with various goals) that all individually implement a heuristic based approach to detecting whether things like Claude Code are working, blocked, done, etc.
If you look at @herdrdev's commit history, you can see around 10 compatibility changes to detect Claude Code within just the past 3 months. (This isn't a dig at Herdr! They're doing great work with what they have, and everyone else is doing the same thing).
Heuristics are not the way. And over-indexing on agentic use cases isn't the way, because this problem is really interesting for other tools too: Homebrew, Terraform, Cargo, etc. etc.
Proprietary protocols and out of band APIs are not the way. They have an O(N) integration problem and require extra work to work over SSH or within local VMs/containers.
The program status specification (OSC 7501) solves this in a reliable, deterministic way that is general-purpose and can be easily adopted by the entire industry.
Read more: mitchellh.com/writing/progra…
brbrown retweeted
What it means to be a great engineer is likely changing. Often the best engineers love “clean” hard problems that have a lot of technical depth but have simple elegant solutions. But for a long time messy hard problems that involve a lot of slog, have had more economic value. With AI, this is even more true as the solution to clean, hard problems are getting closer and closer to free.
The thing I learned this year is that when engineers say they like working on “hard problems”, they actually don't. What they like is puzzle solving, and having a repertoire of patterns that they can pattern match onto traditionally hard problems, usually involving databases or something with scale, etc. And they know that the industry used to pay you a lot for how deep and broad this repertoire was. Unfortunately, in 2026, well, you have a cheat code machine that has infinite breadth and depth for pattern matching. So the question is, do you actually like hard problems? Because there are now hard problems that are a complection of engineering, product, society, culture, politics, and they are fairly intractable, probably unsolvable! Because if you do want to work on those actually hard problems, there is so much money that people will pay you for it. But you’ll have to face that truth about yourself first.
brbrown retweeted
Say hello to Rexie, our mascot for Rex! Superlogical public testing is beginning. We’re working through our mailing list in the order people signed up. Initial testing is limited to macOS but that’ll expand quickly. Welcome, new testers. superlogical.com/updates/pub…
brbrown retweeted
One of the most important things a manager can do for their team is to help them frame information and questions to executives.
“Here’s what the founder already knows, here’s how he is thinking about this topic. Let’s see how we map the info you have to this context”.
brbrown retweeted
🥳 Another one off the list: just merged support for Bloom filters into Hardwood's Parquet file writer. Between this and other writer improvements, significantly faster S3 reads, and better filter handling, we're on the home stretch towards 1.1.0.Beta2!
github.com/hardwood-hq/hardw…
