Blain Smith
Blain Smith
Blain Smith
A personal blog mostly about tech and some of the frustrations with it, but there is some technical goodies.
Latest Posts
2025-10-13 Squat: 8 @ 375# (RPE 7) 8 @ 390# (RPE 8) 8 @ 405# (RPE 9) Shoulder Press: 8 @ 140# (RPE 7) 8 @ 145# (RPE 8) 8 @ 150# (RPE 9) Wide Grip Bench 10 @ 195# (70% of 1RM) 2x12 @ 175# (63% of 1RM) DB Lateral Raises 3x12 @ 25#...
Does this happen to you? Someone shows you something they built. You look at it carefully, think through the implications, and give specific, considered feedback. They walk away deflated. Later, someone tells you that you "seemed...
It had occurred to me that I haven't really solidified my position on coding with "AI" so I thought I would jot down some thoughts on the subject. Come to think of it... It's the exact opposite of... Hmmm... Wait, I already have written...
I don't sit down to design systems with complexity as the point. But I've met some that engineers do. They'll never say it outright, but you can see it in their work. They write layers on top of layers, abstractions stacked on...
As a software engineer who's been through the cycle of tooling bloat and complexity creep, I've come full circle to embrace radical simplicity. After years of wrestling with heavyweight IDEs, managing dozens of extensions, and debugging...
There's something quietly dignified about a clean commit history, well written patch/pull requests, and documentation. It tells you someone gave a damn. That they weren't just slinging code to pass tests, but writing with others,...
I’ve been writing code for about thirty years now. I say that with no small amount of gratitude and a touch of disbelief. Thirty years of debugging, designing, deleting, rewriting. Of shipping things that broke and patching things that...
Whenever someone asks me about learning Go and what online resources I would recommend they check out I always point them to Go by Example. This quick reference style site lets someone who is already good at programming in another...
Recently, Adële wrote about how to block non-human crawlers by setting a cookie to prove a human is visiting a website. I won't go into details here about how the mechanics work, but I wanted to see if I could adapt this to Go middleware...
This past January 13th I turned 43, and as I approached that day, I spent a lot of time over winter break reflecting on the past decades I worked in the tech industry. About a year ago I had a similar reflection when I rage-quit, but I...
I have been involved in writing software professionally for almost 3 decades. A lot has changed since the days of <font> tags and cgi-bin scripts. A lot of the changes have redefined how software is written, organized, collaborated on,...
Well, I think I finally hit a breaking point and I am officially done with the bullshit spreading through the "big" tech industry lately and I don't want to be a part of it anymore. I've been doing some sort of tech work for almost 30...
Today I get to release the first working version of static-httpd. I have always found value in using an HTTP static file server to serve up some quick sites out of the current working directory. I've even written an article way in the...
TL;DR Read the source code for https://git.sr.ht/~blainsmith/hare-bitcask. I have been writing modules for Hare for a while now. It has been a lot of fun to write and helping expand the open source ecosystem of modules for this language...
When building new services, gRPC can be very handy to not only define those services, but also generate a lot of the boilerplate code for server implementations and client libraries. We get the added benefit of a more efficient wire...