Alan Grow

++kids == 2

@lemire Yeah and still doing new interviews. I’m behind on mine.

@alangrow This was a really long time ago. Is this still around?

My programming setup (2026) I use VS Code as my main text editor: It works the same everywhere I care about (macOS, Windows, Linux). It is fast enough. It has useful features like the ability to mount a remote Linux system and work on my MacBook as if I were directly on the remote machine. It has GitHub Copilot. I’m not an advanced VS Code user. I use few extensions — the fewer, the better. I don’t do fancy editing (like multi-cursor editing). I don’t customize shortcuts. I could probably save a few seconds here and there, but I don’t care. I waste more time making coffee than I do editing files suboptimally. I spend little time on Windows. I have one Windows laptop with VS Code preconfigured. It has a shell that can compile C/C++ using CMake. I never remember exactly how it works, but I set it up once each time I update the machine. I use Windows only to debug and benchmark. Although I started programming professionally with Borland and Microsoft tools in a debugger-heavy style, these days I rarely use a debugger. I prefer to write more tests. People are often surprised at how many tests I write and run. I use continuous integration fanatically. I use different programming languages: C, C++, Go, Java, C#, Python, and JavaScript. I try to keep everything under VS Code so I don’t have to learn different tools when switching languages. I use the command line a lot. I also use AI heavily. I like Claude CLI and GitHub Copilot. Grok is available by way of GitHub Copilot and it works well. These are great tools. I ask the AI to build tools, create tests, and more. For example, I recently asked AI to create a tool that checks whether my new function is branch-free by compiling the code, disassembling it, and analyzing the instructions. It is quite clear that I will be building more and more custom tools with AI, to help me. One great use of AI are reviews. Instead of using AI to generate more code faster, I get AI to slow me down, review my code more carefully, throw in more tests. In many instances, quality matters more than volume. I love how AI lets me quickly test ideas: “What if we did it this way instead?” AI really nails down the standard optimizations, letting me concentrate on original techniques. It allows me to up my game. I don't trust the AI, but Iet it try things for me. If the AI can make something work, then I explore further. For profiling, I like perf under Linux. When needed, I use Xcode Instruments on macOS. I prefer to profile under Linux. For building websites for my projects, I default to Hugo. The core idea is that you write content in Markdown and it generates static HTML. No backend required. I adopted Hugo years ago for my homepage (lemire.me/en/). My blog itself runs on WordPress. After 20+ years, it is a highly tuned (though imperfect) setup. Migrating it would be too much work. I don’t like typing content directly in WordPress. So I write my posts in Markdown using VS Code, convert them to HTML, and copy/paste into WordPress. Yeah, there are MarkDown plugins but none of them work well enough. I don’t understand Substack. I will never charge for my blog content or put ads on it. You can still subscribe by email (no ads, ever). I like staying in control. I love MarkDown. I wrote an entire book using Markdown in VS Code: Mastering Programming: From Testing to Performance in Go (amazon.com/Mastering-Prog…). I convert it to LaTeX and then to PDF. I make generous use of Docker containers — for example, to run old versions of Hugo or exotic compilers. I avoid system-specific dependencies whenever possible. I have a few web services and I use AWS Lightsail for them. Build a container, deploy, and forget. Ready to use.

The As Below, So Above Principle: a good frontend derives from its backend. Don't eg: • Give the same thing a different name. • Use radically different data shapes. • Mislead the user about what's really happening behind the scenes.

@stevekrouse Java vibes, for one. steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execut…

I hate the phrase "software factory"

@anuatluru Didn’t geohot try and fail to add this?

I truly hate trying to find a solution to my problem online and coming across this box:

@NathanpmYoung Blackout Rage Gallon

A fun thing to do is whenever someone says a three word thing, I say the initialism back and then they go "oh! you know it?"

@zefi @Gaurab @datarade @nathanfielder Also the Free Real Estate sketch from Tim & Eric. “The following advertisement is intended for Jim Boonie only…” youtu.be/vLU_QpPPUEI

@Gaurab @datarade This is literally the plot line of a @nathanfielder sketch. He helps a psychic with marketing - marketing to the most common name in LA ‘Maria Garcia’. youtu.be/V3i8lOyDTSY?si…

We spent $15,000 on billboards targeting one person: the guy controlling all the chemical spend at a saltwater disposal company in Texas. We mapped his commute and bought every billboard between his house and the oil field. When we finally called, he said "I see your billboards everywhere." That landed us our first oil field contract. At the time our entire operation was a $10,000 reactor built from PVC pipes from Home Depot, turning corn sugar into industrial chemicals. People keep trying to throw it away. It still works. That leaking reactor started a multibillion-dollar company. @ycombinator visited our plant in Houston. The original PVC reactor is still on the floor next to the Bioforge.

Having high standards in a field doesn't *feel* like having high standards. It feels like everyone else has bafflingly low standards and almost no one is even trying.

@kevinleewrites @johnloeber Top right one is a riff on Sonic Youth’s “Goo” album cover

@johnloeber I like the velvet underground one... the OpenAI one is so random

Me, ordering: “….is that …. are you wearing a Black Flag hat?” the cashier, pointing: “Our whole merch strategy is cease & desist”

been feeling kinda stressed lately so I made a little prototype is this anything

lmao the reboot of the reboot is being rebooted ? x.com/digg/status/20…

Lol just discovered *another* mothballed Google chat product called "Spaces." Apparently I missed some messages from Andy back in 2015 about his new programming language. (This was the start of Zig.)

@GrantSlatton Fun fact this keeps extending outward through the air and into space and contains innumerable galaxies.

"grant, why are you buying land?" "to own some of the lithocone after the singularity" "you mean lightcone?" "no, litho as in greek for stone; the cone of earth extending down from my land's borders to the earth's core"

@connerdelights @TylerAlterman See but given the times we live in, Andrew might make small talk about the weather with his server.

Ask your LLM, “What is the least ‘[your name]’ thing I could do right now?” and post the result here

We could fix a lot of software by just putting something good at the 0x0 address.

Please let this be a Google campus sighting.

@Swizec Yep. Also, if an engineer doesn’t want to deal with the production issues THEY caused, they’re either lazy or incurious. The latter sin is deadly. There’s only one way to learn how your code behaves in the real world, and it’s called production.

Back to why having a separate QA team doesnt work. Engineers need to be responsible and accountable for the code they produce. AI or not, sign the code with your phone number then we can ship.

@stylewarning Can you pipe it to `derivative` to poorly reimplement `cat`?

The UNIX "philosophy" stopped at "basic text utilities" instead of "pipelines with text as I/O". Like why doesn't Linux/Mac come with anything interesting? sed, awk, grep, "TUIs", yawn... I want cooler stuff. Like an integrator. So I built `integral`. $ integral '1/(1-x^3)'

Good software leads a quiet existence. Sometimes you have to ship a bug just to be reminded that yes, your users exist, and yes, they care about & depend upon the thing you built.