Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?
Almost every notable managed Postgres provider bundles a connection pooler, giving us a strong hint that connection management is a product problem rather than a user problem.
Fragments — brandur.org
Latest posts
River binaries will get 10 kB lighter
River v0.43 removes test-only transitive dependencies from non-test builds, shrinking Go binaries that include River by about 10 kB.
pgtestdb's template cloning approach to testing is fast
Postgres database templates make pgtestdb’s per-test database isolation remarkably quick, around 100 ms of setup time, and within spitting distance of River’s schema-based approach.
I used to add links by hand
On how LLMs now drive most of this blog’s workflows, replacing what used to be a lot of small, manual edits.
The paradox of free time
On how a long stretch of open, contiguous time makes you … less (?) productive.
Rich, fully attributed context timeout errors in Go
Making Go’s generic context deadline exceeded errors traceable with small helpers that attribute the operation that timed out and indicate how long the timeout was.
SQLite bulk insert with sqlc
Using json_each and json_extract to get bulk inserts in SQLite with sqlc.
Generating words? Keep them short.
It’s not possible to stop the torrent of LLM-generated content, but how about this as a simple ask: when generating content, keep it short.
Turns out, competition works
Gigabit fiber for less money using this one weird trick: move to Austin.
Caveman
In 1980, Michael Crichton characters in Congo spoke like cavemen to save satellite bandwidth. It was absurd. Ridiculous! Forty-five years later, we’re doing the same thing with LLMs to save tokens.
"Somewhere" (2010) review
Short review of Sofia Coppola’s 2010 movie Somewhere . Unless I miss my mark, it’s the same movie as Lost in Translation ?
The special hell of Bolt, Europe's Uber clone
I don’t like this app.
Occasionally injected clocks in Postgres
Using a coalescable parameter to stub time as necessary in tests, but otherwise use the shared database clock across all operations.
Testing the graceful handling of request cancellation in Go, 499s
Using built-in net/http facilities to make sure that canceled requests are abandoned immediately to save time and resources.
Be careful with Dropbox
Fun times with Dropbox’s new ~/Library/CloudStorage location and File Provider API integration.
Optimizing JPEGs with MozJPEG for local archival
Writing a wrapper script around MozJPEG to achieve ~80% compression on large JPEGs with little downside.
The right way to do data fixtures in Go
A safe, succinct test data fixtures pattern using sqlc and validator.
Profiling production for memory overruns + canonical log stats
Using Go’s runtime.MemStats and canonical log lines to isolate huge memory allocations to a specific endpoint.
Go's bytes.Buffer vs. strings.Builder
Taking five minutes to write a benchmark so I know which of these I should be reaching for first.
Postgres UUIDv7 + per-backend monotonicity
How Postgres’ v7 UUIDs are made monotonic, and why that’s a great feature.