matthiasendler

With GitHub down once again, I decided to write this long-overdue blog post. This was the a rel="external" ...

After I published Five Years of Trying to Add Recursion to lychee , one reply I got was a very fair question: If recursion is so hard, how do other link checkers do it? Plenty of them already crawl websites! This sent me down a rabbit hole of reading the

Recursion has been lychee 's longest-standing open issue. It's been sitting there, unresolved, for over five years now. If you haven't come across it before, lychee is a fast, async link checker written in Rust (BTW). You point it at your website, your do

I had a newsletter on this blog for years, but I didn't send a single email for a long time. This is the story of how I finally got it back up and running, and what I learned along the way. A quick note up front, because this caused some confusion: by "ho

I've been refining this blog's design for two decades now. With each new version, I get a little better at knowing what I want. Turns out, my designs tend to get simpler with time. At this point, it's all typography and negative space. I got better at kno

I was listening to a podcast recently where someone pointed out something curious: machines have been better at playing chess than humans for three decades now, and nobody cares. People still watch human chess players. If anything, chess is experiencing a

Over the years, I've gravitated toward two complementary ways to build robust software systems: building up and sanding down. Building up means starting with a tiny core and gradually adding functionality. Sanding down means starting with a very rough ide

Since my professional writing on Rust has moved to the corrode blog , I can be a bit more casual on here and share some of my personal thoughts on the recent debate around using Rust in established software. The two projects in question are git ( kernel t

I've been reviewing other people's code for a while now, more than two decades to be precise. Nowadays, I spend around 50-70% of my time reviewing code in some form or another. It's what I get paid to do, alongside systems design. Over time, I learned a t

One of the most repeated pieces of advice throughout my career in software has been "don't repeat yourself," also known as the DRY principle. For the longest time, I took that at face value, never questioning its validity. That was until I saw actual expe