Bram Geron

@bram

Rust, product. Nushell&jujutsu fanboi. Live in 🐻 Berlin, building an API for APIs at @directus.io . Opinions my own. Used to do research on programming languages. Genocide is wrong. @bgeron on other networks.

335 Folgt279 Follower1.207 Posts

YouTube YouTube Bluesky

Ist das dein Profil?Übernimm es — dann gehört dir bram.dirty.social.Profil übernehmen

Bram Geron@bram· May 19

Cursed Rust

Bram Geron@bram· Apr 13

Asked lefos.com to wish me a happy Monday. Kinda cute.

Lefos emailing me:

Hello Bram,

Happy Monday! A fresh week is yours — may it be full of energy, good work, and moments worth savoring.

Berlin mornings are best with a little momentum, so here's to a wonderful start.

Make it a great one.

Shine bright,

Lefos

Me asking Lefos to wish me a happy Monday on Monday

Bram Geron@bram· Apr 1

Oh no our corporate training website was invaded by rabbits ❤️🐰 directus.io/tv

Bram Geron@bram· Mar 7

Oh no they wrapped our government building!

German Reichstag looks wrapped in white paper

Bram Geron@bram· Feb 18

contest is over, y'all. my colleague already won linkedin

Serhii Tatarintsev's post on LinkedIn:

Recently, I had conversation with a candidate that completely changed the way I think about interviews. Let me explain.

At first, it seemed like they are not a particulary good fit — not a lot of experience in our field, no familiarity with our tech stack.
That is, until I asked one simple question:

“Do you have any references or recommendations?”

“How about a reference from my good friend Ben Franklin?” — candidate winked at me and dropped a neatly arranged stack of bills onto the table.

Needless to say, he was hired on the spot.
So, sometimes it’s not the candidates that fail the interview — it’s you interview process that fails to ask the right question that would let them shine.

Serhii Tatarintsev's post on LinkedIn:

Let's talk about technical interviews.
We all agree that asking engineers to reverse the binary tree on a whiteboard is an outdated approach, right?
But what do we do instead?
Here is my solution.

I ask them to reverse a real tree in my garden.
I now have a whole orchard of upside-down apple trees and a whole team of exceptionally strong engineers. Not a single bug was found in my garden since we changed our interview strategy.

It just shows you that in order to stay ahead in the industry built on innovation you always have to look for novel approaches even for decade-old problems.

Bram Geron@bram· Feb 11

.with_mutable_key().next() does doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/c...

Bram Geron@bram· Feb 9

Nice shot by AlphaPhoenix youtu.be/0rGaTwxWuz0

Bram Geron@bram· Feb 9

what the hell am I doing here? i don’t belong here

Me right outside clouds (visualizing clusters) of Bluesky accounts centered around Danish journalists, French politics, and Japanese artists

visualized right outside the Bluesky milky way, close to nobody

Bram Geron@bram· Jan 27

With a more elaborate prompt. The orange thing (“throat pouch”) is intentional pelican-temporary-throwaway-dbbdd0.netlify.app/pi-session-2...

Bram Geron@bram· Jan 27

After some followup questions:

Bram Geron@bram· Jan 27

Opus 4.5 thinking=medium, single prompt through shittycodingagent.ai Session: pelican-temporary-throwaway-dbbdd0.netlify.app/pi-session-2...

Bram Geron@bram· Jan 16

Google Street View photo of an Asian restaurant in Berlin called “Papa No”

Bram Geron@bram· Jan 13

very boring tho, no satellite broadcasting of payment credentials to the continent youtu.be/fM5w7bFNvWI?...

Screenshot of a Chaos Communication Congress talk called "Don't look up" that explains that much of satellite communication was unencrypted, showing a cleartext XML capture of full credit card payment details

Bram Geron@bram· Dec 7

🙈

Bram Geron@bram· Nov 25

I’m learning about Business Model Canvas

Page of the book; about a modeling technique called Business Model Canvas. It concerns 4 main dimensions: 1 Value Propositions; 2 Customers; 3 Infrastructure; 4 Finances. Each is subdivided, for instance within Infrastructure, you model “what do we do (to make our value props possible”, “what do we need”, and “who do we need”.

Bram Geron@bram· Oct 17

They let you translate from/to Gen Z 😭

Kagi Translate offering multiple GenZ translations for “I’m going to the shop, can I get something for you?”, including “Boutta hit up the store, u need anything?”

Bram Geron@bram· Oct 4

@hossenfelder.bsky.social could have written this: “They now play happily in a dream world, internally consistent but lost to science”

Aforementioned quote in context: it’s about ‘70s behaviorists within the field of artificial intelligence

Bram Geron@bram· Aug 25

48:00 Stroustrup knew about discriminated unions and `match`, and chose to leave it out

Slide with quote from Stroustrup ‘94 Design and Evolution of C++: “The Simula67 INSPECT statement was deliberately not introduced into C++. The reason for that is to encourage modularity through the use of virtual functions.”

Bram Geron@bram· Aug 25

“This 1966 syntax is better than anything I get to use in C++, by the way”

Slide with a fragment from C.A.R. Hoare’s 1996 paper called “Record handling” showing structural pattern matching (like Rust match on enum)

Bram Geron@bram· Aug 24

Speculation: traditional consultants are too project-based and not enough project-based. Funny. Just this weekend I've been reading about the FDE role at companies like OpenAI. Seems a good fit because OpenAI can evolve towards customer needs ($) newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/forward-de...

Screenshot of portion of linked article:

3. The FDE role at OpenAI

Colin Jarvis is Head of Forward Deployed Engineering at OpenAI. He initially joined in 2022 as a Solutions Architect, and became the Head of Solutions Architecture, last year. At the beginning of this year, Colin presented a business case for setting up a Forward Deployed Engineering Team, to have a more targeted offering. The group started with two FDEs, and today there are more than 10 at the company in:

US: New York and San Francisco

Europe: Dublin, London, Munich, Paris

Asia: Tokyo and Singapore

OpenAI still has a “Solutions Architect” (SA) role. Both SAs and FDEs help with the challenge of LLMs being complicated for customers to work with.

FDEs are more hands-on and typically work with more ambiguity than SAs traditionally do. SAs are more like advisory roles: they rarely write code on customers’ infrastructure, and usually build minimum viable products (MVPs), or proofs of concept (PoC) with anonymized or offline cuts of data.

FDEs are much more hands-on: they write code directly on customer infrastructure and use customer tooling for this. FDEs also align with OpenAI’s research objectives, and work with customers who can most likely build solutions that help advance the research direction at OpenAI. FDEs need to work with more ambiguity than traditional cloud solution architects.

FDEs help advance the product roadmap. In one case, OpenAI worked with a voice customer on call center automation, and FDEs created evals on the voice model. Initially, the model wasn’t performing well enough for the customer to commit to deploying it.

So, the FDE team went back to OpenAI’s research department with data and worked on improving the model’s performance for voice use cases, leading the customer to be the first to deploy the advanced solution in production.

OpenAI’s Realtime API was also improved by this work. In the end, it was a win-win:

Bram Geron@bram· Aug 23

Damn I’m loving Kagi

Kagi answering “was 2000 24 years ago” correctly and clearly

Kagi answering “Was 2000 25 years ago?” correctly

Bram Geron@bram· Aug 10

TIL vendor extensions are making OpenAPI a lot more useful

Bram Geron@bram· Aug 10

Bram Geron@bram· Jun 3

Kagi Translate is incredibly good. Not the fastest, but no compromise in quality or experience. (Just like their search)

An example of Kagi Translate in use. The paid translation app offers multiple variant translations, interprets the tone of the source, and relates to the tone of the main translation. You can hover over fragments of the output and see variants of each fragment, with explanations of the subtleties of variants of that fragment

Bram Geron@bram· Apr 28

“I’m unambiguously inter.” While the US+UK descend further into madness, the Berlin city government raises awareness for intersex people ❤️🏳️‍🌈

German poster by Berlin city government featuring an intersex death metal band leader and software engineer, reading “Ich bin eindeutig inter.“

Bram Geron@bram· Apr 21

Searching "[u8] -> osstr" in rustdoc finds it: doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/?... (I always forget about that when I need it myself)

Search results in standard library rustdoc, showing how to create an OsStr from bytes either with unsafety or in a platform-specific way

Bram Geron@bram· Mar 19

Via a friend, apparently from Reddit

Three-panel meme. First panel, someone says: "Many top scientists are on the autism spectrum". Second panel someone behind them says: "So technically autism causes vaccines." Third panel, the first person looks back in wtf

Bram Geron@bram· Mar 8

Coffee in sunlight.

A glass beaker of coffee standing in direct sunlight on a countertop. Whereas normally coffee looks brown, now the coffee looks bright: the bulk is rusty red but the edges look yellow, almost green.

Bram Geron@bram· Feb 11

I like that this makes it more reasonable to stream JSON in a natural format (rather than JSON Lines). Here's a demo with a JSON version of du. Each program has one responsibility, the way it's supposed to be on shell.

A Unix pipeline with two programs is shown. The source program computes the disk size of a bunch of directories and outputs a JSON array of objects. The sink program pretty-prints the JSON table. Computing the disk size takes a while, and you can see which directory is being analyzed because the result for that directory is empty while it is computing.

Bram Geron@bram· Feb 11

I made a thing! Deser-incomplete lets you parse incomplete or broken data with Serde. Use it for ingesting streaming JSON, and making it useful before end of stream. docs.rs/deser-incomp...