john mcbride's landing page
Anyone who's built a substantial Go project that incorporates C code (like sqlite ) knows that cross compiling with CGO can be very painful. One of Go's best native features is that you can use your system's cross compiler (like XCode's bundled gcc) to easily build binaries for whatever system is supported by go tool dist list (like linux/amd64 or darwin/arm64 ). Typically all you need to do is…
Last week, we released tapes , a new open source agentic telemetry tool for understanding the "what" , "why" , and "how" of your AI agents. One of the biggest problems I've noticed with the current age of AI agent tools is that they're all "opaque" and once you're done with a session, typically all of that context is lost: all of the learned lessons, all of the decisions, all of the errors, and…
"There is no secure AI enclave, Neo." Another week, another AI app everyone's talking about. This week, it seems to be Clawdbot , the "connect with anything and do everything" AI agent. Practically speaking, Clawdbot is interesting since the maintainers took the time and energy to go and integrate it with a vast number of services on its "gateway": iMessage, WhatsApp, Discord, Gmail, GitHub,…
Recently, OpenCode , a very popular open source AI coding agent, was hit with a massive CVE which allowed for arbitrary remote code execution (RCE). If you're unfamiliar with cyber-security, penetration testing, red-teaming, or the murky world of building secure software, a RCE vulnerability is the type of thing that nation state actors in Russia and North Korea dream of. In theory, it allows an…
import Note from "../../../components/Note.astro"; <Note> Around the same time I authored this post, Steve announced he was claiming tens of thousands of dollars in crypto currency from a meme coin based on Gas Town. This post is about the Gas Town multi-agent orchestration project and its implications for future AI and engineering infrastructure. I do not endorse or affiliate with this frankly…
The Cambrian explosion was a period of time before human civilisation, before dinosaurs, before most of what we know as "life" today. It's a distinct period of time where droves of complex life emerged leading to more and more complexity on the planet. All this eventually led to what we know as life today. I believe we are on the precipice of a Cambrian explosion of software: AI coding agents have…
And just like sushi, the range of quality is incredibly wide. Really bad sushi tastes awful, is pungent, and, if it's poorly prepared while there's bacteria or parasites present, it might even kill you!! On the other hand, really incredible sushi is made by a master chef, takes time and energy to prepare, required years of apprenticeship to learn the necessary techniques, demands the right high…
noun <br> abrv: DDD, ddd do·pa·mine dri·ven de·vel·op·ment | ˈdō-pə-mən ˈdri-vən di-ˈve-ləp-mənt<br> DDD* | ˌdē-ˌdē-ˈdē 1 : The circular practice of using AI agentic coding tools with near zero human input or feedback. An extension of "vibe coding" where the vibes have completely taken over. The software engineering equivalent of sitting in a casino at 3am, deep in the red, waiting for a hit. Any…
This year is going to be big for AI. We're seeing the emergence of more powerful models with improved reasoning capabilities, nuanced "mixture-of-experts" architectures, and better software integrations. Major tech companies are racing to build the best foundation model possible, indie-hackers are building impressive consumer platforms on top of AI, and open-source alternatives are becoming…
On November 1st, 2024, OpenSauced leadership announced that the company would be joining The Linux Foundation. Bdougie wrote : The natural next step in our journey is to extend our impact beyond GitHub. We’re beyond excited to announce our new home with the Linux Foundation, where we’ll collaborate to expand data insights within the LFX product, bringing even richer intelligence to the open source…
So long tech Xitter! You will not be sorely missed. As Kelsey Hightower recently asserted : Twitter became overrun with hate, and while I believe in free speech, I'm not looking to attend a Klan rally. Before I log off for good, I wanted to archive a few of my Xitter "greatest hits" - posts that I think were particularly fun, informative, or deserved to see the light of day. I bought my first…
import Youtube from "../../../components/Youtube.astro"; <Youtube videoId="vU2Gj40v9II" /> This is probably one of the stupidest Neovim plugins I've built. And I'm having a ton of fun doing it. rip-and-tear.nvim is a super-not-serious Neovim plugin that plays a configured mp3 when you're typing in the editor. The original idea, like so many great hacker scenes in movies, was to have an epic…
import Note from "../../../components/Note.astro"; <Note> This post originally appeared on OpenSauced's blog. This post is preserved here in its entirety as the Linux Foundation acquired OpenSauced in late 2024 </Note> At the beginning of October, the OpenSauced engineering team completed a weeks-long migration of our infrastructure, data, and pipelines to Microsoft Azure. Before this move, we had…
import Note from "../../../components/Note.astro"; <Note> This post originally appeared on OpenSauced's blog. This post is preserved here in its entirety as the Linux Foundation acquired OpenSauced in late 2024 </Note> Last week, the OpenSauced engineering team released the Pizza CLI, a powerful and composable command-line tool for generating CODEOWNER files and integrating with the OpenSauced…
It's universally agreed that eating a lot of junk food and candy over your lifetime will lead to all sorts of problems: diabetes, increased cancer risk, obesity, heart problems, digestive issues, etc. And if you grew up in the early 90s, maybe you learned these lessons from the "Food Pyramid": an ominous, overly simplified, all encompassing guide to the various food groups. The pyramid was an…
import Note from "../../../components/Note.astro"; <Note> This post originally appeared on OpenSauced's blog. This post is preserved here in its entirety as the Linux Foundation acquired OpenSauced in late 2024 </Note> When you first start building AI applications with generative AI, you'll likely end up using OpenAI's API at some point in your project's journey. And for good reason! Their API is…
Astro is a fast & dynamic web framework designed to be flexible enough for small static websites, blogs, big interactive apps, and more. I've been interested in checking it out since building silly little static websites that are "Content-first" is a fun past-time of mine. Since Neovim is my main text editor, it took abit of configuration fu to get things up and running. Herein is my Astro setup:…
Earlier this week, I had a file of names, each delimited by a newline: john jack jill But really, I needed this file to be in the form: { "full_name": "name" }, This file wasn't absolutely huge, but it was big enough that editing it manually would have been annoying. I thought to myself, "instead of editing this file manually or generating it correctly, how can I spend the maximum amount of time…
Tmux is one of my favorite utilities: it's a terminal multiplexer that lets you create persistent shell sessions, panes, windows, etc. all within a single terminal. It's a great way to organize your shell sessions and natively give you multi-shell environments to work in without having to rely on a terminal program for those features. You'd think in a world of modern applications and fancy…
I had a huge year. And every year, around this time, when I have a well deserved opportunity to take a break and prepare for the next year, I like to reflect: think on the year's accomplishments, derive some lessons learned, and drink in everything from my experiences. Herein are my musings and thoughts regarding the last year. Leaving AWS I still think about my time at AWS: it was a short, but…
I recently read this excellent little bit of programming horror titled: "4 billion if statements" . It chronicles how one could use an insane number of hard coded if statements to check if any given 32 bit number is even or odd. Instead of do this the normal and efficient way with a modulus operator and for loop, hard coding if statements requires some clever meta programming, some custom assembly…
If you were to visit one of the biggest React drag and drop libraries on GitHub, Atlassian’s react-beautiful-dnd , you would be greeted with the following message: This library continues to be relied upon heavily by Atlassian products, but we are focused on other priorities right now and have no current plans for further feature development or improvements. The project has over 30 thousand stars…
import Youtube from "../../../components/Youtube.astro"; Loosely typed programming languages have been around for a very, very long time. And they’ve been the center of many problems for about as long. One of the first modern “typeless” programming languages was Ken Thompson’s B: a machine independent language who’s primary use was for very early Unix systems development at the legendary Bell…
Years ago, entrepreneurs and innovators predicated that “software would eat the world”. And to little surprise, year after year, the world has become more and more reliant on software solutions. Often times, that software is (or indirectly depends on) some open source software, maintained by a group of people whose only affiliation to one another may be participation in that open source project’s…
The world of software engineering influencers, what I typically like to refer to as "tech-fluencers", has grown significantly in the last few years. There are people who have built entire personal brands and businesses solely on the basis of their online tech content. And many massive technology companies now participate in the same spheres that 5 years ago would have been unheard of (just think…
import Youtube from "../../../components/Youtube.astro"; There's something I feel like I need to acknowledge around my maintainership of spf13/cobra. During my time at AWS, I had a really hard time contributing to open source projects that were important to me (and important to the broader ecosystem). I didn't have the energy, but more importantly, I didn't have the bandwidth. There's alot of red…
This is my last week at Amazon Web Services. And while the last year has been an incredible journey diving deep into the world of containers, Linux, Rust, Kubernetes, and building operating systems, I've made the difficult decision to leave. And I'm very excited to be joining the incredible team at OpenSauced where we'll be building the future of open source insights, tooling, and innovation.…
There’s a mantra that people in software engineering love: 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people. Ironically, often, people will group themselves within the minority of workers (“of course I’m one of the high output people doing most of the work!”) But whether we’re talking about individual engineering teams, bigger organizations, or broadly across entire companies, people will find that…
When the Agile Manifesto first appeared in 2001, the industry had just finished reeling from the catastrophic collapse of the dot-com bubble. Massive amounts of capital had swarmed into the tech market, every company was “adopting” the internet, and, when the inevitable economic downturn arrived, many software engineers lost their jobs. Flush with cash due to the low interest rates of 1998 and…
Weeks ago, Denis Pushkarev, the author of core-js, published “So, what’s next?” . While a long and lengthy stream of consciousness on the state of the project, I believe it is something that anyone and everyone who interacts with open source software should read. It chronicles an emotional tale of his passion project, distrust & hate for him, his seemingly selfless solitary quest for a better web,…
import Youtube from "../../../components/Youtube.astro"; <Youtube vidoeId="KoL-2WTlr04" /> I know. Any sane person's editor already has spellchecking built in. And enabled by default. But I could never leave my beloved Neovim (and all the muscle memory I've built) just to spell things correctly! That's why I became a programmer dammit! Who needs to know how to spell correctly when I can have…
"This is the social media network of a software engineer. Not as clumsy or random as Twitter; an elegant network for a more civilized age." ― obi-wan kenobi Over the last week, I've abandoned my Twitter account in favor of diving head first into the world of Mastodon and the "Fediverse" . So far, it's been a surprising, delightful, and enriching experience. By the time I moved to Mastodon, I had…
Windows 7 is no more
In the summer of 2022, I left my job at VMware for Amazon Web Services. It was a bitter sweet journey; I loved my time at VMware and I loved working on some cutting edge things in the Kubernetes space. Even just a few months latter, the project I was working on is now completely defunct. The process to getting into AWS was no easy one. But in the end, over the course of interviewing at many…
These simple go tests check the "leaky-ness" of using channels in Go. There are two methods described here; one using both a local context, and the parent context. When tests are run against both, the LeakyAsync method runs faster, but fails the leak checker as goroutines are not resolved or cleaned up. In a production system with possibly thousands of go routines being spun up, this could result…
(Note: this is from a blog archieve dated 2019/01/21. These opinions are my own and the slack API may have changed) TLDR: The Slack API exposes endpoints for a token holder to read all public and private messages. In today's world, violations of privacy are no surprise. Between all the leaks and data dumps, many people have accepted this as "just the world we live in". But what if information was…
(Note: this post is from a legacy blog dated 12/14/2018 and some content or links may have changed) A few weeks ago, this issue was opened on a popular Node NPM package called Event Stream . This package enables Node streams to be simpler and streamlines many I/O operations within Node. Regardless, this package is a key dependency for many other Node packages and has over 1 million downloads per…
(Note: this is from an old blog archieve dating 2018/11/05. Some things with Rethink have very likely changed) RethinkDB is a JSON based, non-relational database that provides a promise oriented, Node JS backend. It integrates seamlessly with JSON type data and is a production ready option for Node infrastructures. Pre-reqs: Docker, Node, NPM This post will serve as a brief overview of RethinkDB…
If you are a Oregon State CS 344 student, then you've been told to develop exclusively on the OS1 server. Unfortunately, this server is frequently nuked by fork bombs. If you are unable to run a full CentOS virtual machine, then here is a step by step guide to getting a CentOS docker container running on your computer. This way, you can continue to work on your assignments in a similar environment…
(Note: this is a post from a legacy blog. This post was intended to help new OSU students get started with Vim) I'd consider myself some sort of Vim - evangelist. It's an incredible tool and has ALOT of power. If there's something you wish Vim could do, there's probably a plugin for it or a way to make Vim do it with scripting (in its own language!). Moderate proficiency in Vim is a skill that…