Cynthia Dunlop

If only the default response to prompts like "help me correct my English" would try to maintain the author's voice instead of blandifying everything.

- Inside CUDA: Building eBPF uprobes for GPU monitoring: kcl17
- How I found a bypass in Google's big anti-adblock update: Derin Eryılmaz
- GitOps without Git: GitOps ≠ CommitOps: Benjamin Buetikofer
- Inverse triangle inequality: matklad

- Why continuous profiling is the fourth pillar of observability: Marcus Hirt, JC Mackin ( @datadoghq.com)
- How we tracked down a Go 1.24 memory regression across hundreds of pods: Nayef Ghattas (@datadoghq.com)
- OpenZFS bug ported to Zig: Andrew Kelley

Screenshot of Piotr's writethat.blog picks for July 2025

@sarna.dev's picks for writethat.blog last month…

- How Turso made connections to SQLite databases 575x faster: @glaubercosta.bsky.social (@tur.so)
- Resizable structs in Zig: Tristan Pemble
- How we rooted Copilot: Vaisha Bernard (Eye Security)

Kinda along those lines - Victory City (Rushdie) was a nice summer read.

A new Writing for Developers podcast for your listening pleasure: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/221/ This one covers how blogging makes you a better engineer, using LLMs to review your writing, and why team writing culture matters.

YouTube video by TEDx Talks Tech Promised Everything. Did it deliver? | Scott Hanselman | TEDxPortland

A must-watch talk from @scott.hanselman.com. Scott and I are of the same vintage, and I am embarrassed (mortified!) by how revolting some of our generational peers have become. Technology still has a unique power to improve our lives, but wow, do we ever have work to do. youtu.be/dVG8W-0p6vg?...

Not sure about DevTo...but the app looks really useful!

Our latest tech blogger interview features “long-time performance geek” @tanelpoder.com. He just hit 18 years of blogging, and that deep experience really comes across in his thoughtful responses. writethatblog.substack.com/p/tanel-pode...

It's a great read!

- How we decreased GitLab repo backup times from 48 hours to 41 minutes: Karthik Nayak, Manuel Kraft (@gitlab.com)
- Cross-compiling Zig on an old Kindle:
@samkhawase.com
- The art of SQL query optimization: Jan Nidzwetzki
- My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts:
Thomas Ptacek (fly.io)

a screenshot of writethat.blog, with the first few June selections

Piotr’s latest picks for http://writethat.blog…
- How to store Go pointers from assembly: Francesco Mazzoli
- Homomorphically encrypting CRDTs: Jake Lazaroff
- jemalloc postmortem: Jason Evans
- Fuzzer blind spots (meet Jepsen!): djb (@tigerbeetle.com )

Excerpt from a blog on writing more often

Nice read from Pedro Tavares, a @eatonphil.bsky.social book club alumni ordep.dev/posts/writin...

Scott Hanselman and Mark Downie: Blogging for Developers Scott and Mark chat about writing technical blogs that get read (even in an era of TikTok and goldfish brains)

Absolutely! We published a clean transcript (with links to the many great people/resources mentioned) at writethatblog.substack.com/p/scott-hans...

GitHub - scynthiadunlop/WritingForDevelopersBook: About the book "Writing for Developers: Blogs That Get Read," which is all about writing more compelling engineering blog posts. By Piotr Sarna & Cynt... About the book "Writing for Developers: Blogs That Get Read," which is all about writing more compelling engineering blog posts. By Piotr Sarna & Cynthia Dunlop. - scynthiadunlop/Writ...

Listening to 'Writing for Developers: Blogs That Get Read' and realizing they're not just talking about building your tech brand. They're talking about writing ideas so compelling they transcend our little technology cliques entirely and hit the top of Hacker News.

github.com/scynthiadunl...

Much of what makes ScyllaDB so powerful is the architecture and performance optimizations. It's built on seastar.io

Being shared-nothing and per-core sharded enables it to *scale out* to many servers and *scale up* to many cores on each server.

Most datastores are only great at scaling up or out.

Scott Hanselman and Mark Downie: Blogging for Developers Scott and Mark chat about writing technical blogs that get read (even in an era of TikTok and goldfish brains)

@scott.hanselman.com chats with @poppastring.com about technical blogging. Really, what else do we need to say? Just read/listen. writethatblog.substack.com/p/scott-hans...

This is a really nice conversation on the reality of technical blogging – from the perspective of an engineer (@sarna.dev) and co-founder (@glaubercosta.bsky.social) who were both forced into writing, but grew to love it.

- Migrating away from Rust - Brandon Reinhart, deadmoney
- Doom GPU flame graphs - Brendan Gregg

- The DuckLake manifesto - Mark Raasveldt & @hannes.muehleisen.org, @duckdb.org
- The lost decade of small data? @hannes.muehleisen.org, @duckdb.org
- How the economics of multitenancy work - Aditya Jayaprakash, @useblacksmith.bsky.social
- Why old games never die (but new ones do) - pawlicker

A screenshot of writethat.blog, May picks

Piotr’s latest picks for http://writethat.blog…
- We rewrote large parts of our API in Go using AI - @avi.im, @tur.so
- Reservoir sampling - @samwho.dev
- End the obsession with servers - @technosophos.bsky.social, @fermyon.com

And, allegedly, a new one coming this fall!

Glad you found it valuable! Warnings about not revealing trade secrets were tacked on to appease the publisher and their legal dept. 🙃

Book cover for Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd edition, by Martin Kleppmann and Chris Riccomini. It has a coloured picture of a jumping Indian Wild Boar (similar to the first edition, but not identical).

Got the cover design for the second edition of DDIA from the publisher. Now just need to finish the effin’ manuscript…

An excerpt from an interview with Glauber Costa about technical blogging

A peek into @glaubercosta.bsky.social's path from reluctant writer to writing-obsessed co-founder -- and his writing tips for others writethatblog.substack.com/p/glauber-co...

Looking forward to it!

YouTube video by Flying High with Flutter Writing for Developers with Piotr Sarna

This was a really nice conversation on tech blogging, covering topics like:
- Writing in English even if it’s not your native language
- Using AI to review your writing
- Recognizing/using blog post patterns like “the bug hunt” and “rewrote it in X” youtu.be/6DVg7HeA2oU

Low-Latency & Performance-Obsessed Engineers: Share Your Insights At P99 CONF Obsessed with high performance and low latency engineering? Discuss your experiments, optimizations, ideas, and lessons learned with ~30K like-minded engineers... at P99 CONF 2025!

Who wants to present at P99 CONF this year? 👀 www.p99conf.io/2025/05/05/c...

"Robert Johnson" could certainly crank out a book that fast ;-) books.apple.com/us/author/ro...

- The case of the vanishing CPU: A Linux kernel debugging story - Sergei Trifonov, @clickhouse.com
- Tracking the ISS with an Arduino - Farid Rener
- ZCS: An entity component system in Zig - Mason Remaley
- Concurrency in Haskell - Matt Kline
- Differential coverage for debugging - Russ Cox