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
I've been reading Drew Devault's blog for quite some time. Recently, he and a small team released a new programming language called Hare that is laser focused on systems programming and meant to compete with C, Rust, Zig, but have some...
I guess society celebrates turning 40 as a big milestone birthday. I might have some wisdom, anecdotes, and pithy quotes to share that might serve others well since I've been alive on this big ball of rock for 4 decades. Here are 40...
I read David Crawshaw's recent post about the same topic and I thought it would be nice to do the same. Go I've always tried to be a polyglot programmer to allow myself to learn and be a well rounded software engineer, but as time went...
I have written a lot of HTTP clients that talk to 3rd party APIs over the years and there have been some patterns that have emerged and so I thought I would share them in hopes they help others. The major concepts I want to highlight...
I get this question a decent amount from people who don't lift and my answers usually consist of: "I spend all day staring at a computer screen and it offers a nice balance to work life behind a desk." "It facinates me what the human...
Over the years I've been programming and people ask me what I do for a living, I try to explain to them as best I can. Inevitably, they respond with something along the lines of "that sounds very hard and complicated". To someone without...
I managed to switch my site over to using Zola. It was very tempting since the template engine looked a lot simpler than Hugo. It took me about 3 hours to figure out how to map each of the Hugo features to the Zola equivalent. I've...
Update: This idea got popular enough that I decided to turn it into a tool. You can grab it from http://pprof.sh. There are a lot of great articles on the interwebs about profiling entire Go applications for CPU and memory usage, however...
If you haven't noticed already I really love plain text so I thought I would find some plain text protocols that are used in different software systems. The Redis Protocol specification states it best by describing its own protocol, but...
Every since the world started shutting down when COVID-19 hit I've been finding myself reverting back to simpler things. With the constant firehose of information from the news channels, social feeds, and just general information...
Well, my undergraduate career is finally over. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute I was fortunate enough to get accepted to my first choice back in 2000 when I graduated high school. Unfortunately, however, it wasn't without its speed...