February 2026

Optimizing SQL CASE Expression Evaluation by Pepijn Van Eeckhoudt

Optimization 1: Short-Circuit Early Exit

Optimization 2: Optimized Result Merging

Optimization 3: Column Projection

Optimization 4: Eliminating Scatter in Two-Branch Case

Optimization 5: Table Lookup of Constants

Stop Using The Ralph Loop Plugin

The Economic Intervention That Stops Engineer Attrition by Lloyd

Option B wins every time—until it does not. Until a critical system fails during a product launch. Until you lose five senior engineers in eighteen months and the CFO start/s asking why you’re spending $1.4 million annually to rehire for preventable problems.

Raw Chicken Price History

Go 1.26 interactive tour by Anton Zhiyanov

My highights

• Vectorized operations (experimental)
• Goroutine leak profile (experimental)

Why is calling my asm function from Rust slower than calling it from C? by Ohad Ravid

Promoted your best developer to manager? Congratulations. You just destroyed two careers. by Matt Watson

Engineers optimize for code quality. Managers optimize for human potential. These are fundamentally different skill sets.

I once watched a team’s velocity drop by half after hiring their best engineer. by Alex Di Mango

Teams don’t scale through individual brilliance. They scale through collective momentum.

The engineers who actually multiplied output never looked like rockstars. They wrote boring, obvious code that anyone could maintain. They approved pull requests that were good enough, not perfect. They spent time pairing with people who were stuck instead of cranking out features alone.

Amazon S3 quietly became a concurrency control system. by Raul Junco

People often ask how we balance speed and quality at @tryramp. by Eric Glyman

We don’t. Because speed is how you get to quality.

December 2025

On Metastable Failures and Interactions Between Systems by Aleksey Charapko

Fault-tolerance is hard, and in the case of metastable failures, maybe next-to-impossible and/or expensive. I have a hunch that we may not be able to avoid metastable failures entirely in large, non-trivial systems that are also economical to operate, because of these “forced” actions that systems sometimes have to take. However, the three strategies above remain effective mitigation approaches. Just replace “avoid” with “avoid as much as possible.”

A catastrophic accident has struck the Mars outpost. Communication with Earth is completely severed. Only a handful of survivors remain.

Marsettler is a simulation where players shape the story of these survivors. Your journey becomes a narrative—a story worth sharing.

What’s in v0.0.0

• Autonomous AI: Characters find iron mines, extract ore, and haul it to the warehouse on their own
• Behavior Tree System: The architecture powering AI decision-making
• Resource Management: Mines deplete and disappear when exhausted

Run Simulation

How we found a bug in Go’s arm64 compiler by Thea Heinen

A release? Infrastructure changes? The position of Mars?

Our investigation stalled for a while at this point – making guesses, testing guesses, trying to infer if the panic rate went up or down, or if nothing changed.

A reproducible crash with standard library only? This felt like conclusive evidence that our problem was a runtime bug.

• https://github.com/golang/go/commit/f7cc61e7d7f77521e073137c6045ba73f66ef902