Brandur (@brandur) / X

Brandur

6,487 posts

Brandur

@brandur

Engineering @ River. Ex-Heroku, Stripe, Snowflake, Stainless. Occasional writer. Themes: web APIs, Postgres, software resilience, and efficient UIs.

Austin, TX

Joined March 2009

Brandur
@brandur
Nov 14, 2025
Java: You're trying to understand how some code works. Open a file, it's ~20 lines of trivial boilerplate and getters/setters. Open another, same. And another. And another. This happens like 75 times. It's legitimately hard to find a place where anything is actually being done.
Brandur
@brandur
Apr 28, 2022
PayPal evacuating SF June 3rd. That's everyone in payments gone — Block (Square), Stripe, Brex, Credit Karma, etc. I'm sure just a coincidence — no relation to Prop C. Once again, San Franciscans get what they ostensibly want. We'll see how long this train can stay on the rail.
Brandur
@brandur
Oct 15, 2017
A neat public art installation in Glen Park in SF: A lens focuses the sun to burn a line in a redwood log. It's advanced every day, creating a new line. After a year, it's moved to a new log. When complete, the trio will be an archive of three years of sun and weather.
Brandur
@brandur
Oct 9, 2019
Git tip I wish I'd discovered ten years ago: if you `git config --global diff.noprefix true` it removes the silly `a/` and `b/` prefixes so that when you double-click select one to copy, you get a usable filename instead of a mangled path.
Brandur
@brandur
Jul 12, 2018
There's nothing quite as nefarious as a technical decision made via Slack: stakeholders miss it if they're not around, points are poorly stated as they're strung across 50 half-baked thoughts, context exists across pages of jumbled noise, *and* it's time consuming. I miss email.
Brandur
@brandur
Mar 21, 2019
At Stripe we switched to a GUI-driven deploy process for services. I'm a die-hard terminal person for life, but it's so much better. Especially during the duress of an incident, there's nothing like being able to click boxes to resolution instead of looking up obscure CLI flags.
Brandur
@brandur
Nov 3, 2022
Stripe's prime competency isn't payments, engineering, or product — it's PR, and always was. I look on in reluctant admiration at how even layoffs are executed about as masterfully as is possible. Sorry to anyone who got hit. This sucks.
Brandur
@brandur
Oct 23, 2023
I am sorry for everyone who was hoodwinked into providing free content to Medium. Look what they've done to it. This should've been predictable, and though the logos in play have changed, is still a relevant lesson to learn today ...
Brandur
@brandur
Jul 27, 2018
The next time someone says that a test suite is slow because it's a big project, point out that you can build Postgres from scratch on a fast machine in ~30s and run its test suite in ~15s. Test suites are slow because their progenitors were sloppy, not because they have to be.
Brandur
@brandur
Jul 9, 2024
Sometimes I hear a lot about another database and decide to run a little experiment against one to see whether the hype is real or not. My jaw literally fell open when I read this.
Brandur
@brandur
Jul 23, 2023
Car crashes over railing and down pedestrian staircase. Turns out, it's one of SF's infamous smash and grab teams, who promptly run off. Meanwhile, progressives concentrate fire on the city's REAL scourge: AVs. As often the case, SF is beyond parody.
FriscoLive415
@friscolive415
Jul 23, 2023
Unreal footage: SF resident captures epic car crash at 19th St & Sanchez from multiple angles. Source: youtube.com/@juliabrownsf
00:00
Brandur
@brandur
Jan 20, 2023
Today, saw a person sit at a table in a cafe and read a book for three hours. Didn't pull out their phone or laptop or distract themselves in any other way. Practically a superhuman feat in the contemporary age. I bet < 1% of humanity still has the capacity to do this.
Brandur
@brandur
Sep 25, 2025
As always, it's the guys who call everyone else f*scists who eagerly clamber over each other to be the first to dehumanize, deperson, and demand violence, ironically behaving far more like their favorite word than those they slander.
The Lunduke Journal
@LundukeJournal
Sep 24, 2025
A group of Lefist Activists are pushing for the Ruby on Rails project to remove the project’s founder (@dhh) because they claim he “holds racist and transphobic views” and “other traits undesirable”. This group, which compares themselves to the French resistance during WWII, is
Brandur
@brandur
Nov 20, 2023
Myself and @blakegentry did what you should never do, and implemented a new open source job queue. Written in our favorite language (Go) on our favorite database (Postgres), it's been a lot of fun hacking on this on and off over the last few months.
brandur.org
River: a Fast, Robust Job Queue for Go + Postgres
Introducing River, a Postgres-based job queue designed for resilience and correctness through strong transactional guarantees.