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Deep, recent reads ranked by depth and freshness.

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  1. 01Martin Fowler · architecture

    When Software Meets Hardware

    A software engineering team modernizing a large-scale retail IoT system of 800,000 battery-powered sensors faced challenges integrating software practices with embedded hardware. By building physical sensor farms, virtual emulators, and self-diagnosing firmware, the team learned to design for intermittent connectivity, power efficiency, and fleet-level observability. The project succeeded by treating the physical world, hardware constraints, and engineering environments as core parts of the system lifecycle.

    DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read10 days ago

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  2. 02Go · performance

    Better HTTP/1 connection reuse

    Failing to read an HTTP/1 response body completely prevents connection reuse, forcing clients to repeatedly pay the high cost of TCP and TLS handshakes. While developers previously had to implement complex manual body-draining logic, Go 1.27 introduces automatic asynchronous response draining in the net/http package. This improvement allows developers to simply close response bodies without worrying about connection pooling performance.

    DEPTH ■■■■■7 min read11 days ago

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  3. 03Martin Fowler · performance

    Are Harnesses Worth the Cost?

    An experiment was conducted to evaluate whether behavioral harnesses improve coding agent reliability when building a complex backend-for-frontend service. While frontier models succeeded consistently with or without a harness, the harness significantly increased token usage, time, and cost without improving final output. However, for a cost-optimized model, the harness improved success rates from 30 percent to 100 percent.

    DEPTH ■■■■■17 min read12 days ago

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  4. 04Go · architecture

    Arch-specific SIMD in Go

    Go 1.27 introduces the archsimd package to provide low-level architecture-specific SIMD intrinsics for amd64, arm64, and wasm without requiring assembly. The API uses sensible naming conventions, zero-cost type reinterpretation, and opaque masks to improve usability and maintainability while achieving high performance. The resulting design enables developers to write optimized vectorized code safely with proper runtime CPU feature checking and compiler optimizations.

    DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read3 weeks ago

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