I just published "Stacktraces", the next piece in my "Understanding the Go Runtime" series, and it answers a question we all take for granted: how does the runtime know the entire call chain when your program panics?
The trace is built in two phases, and once you see them the magic disappears:
1. The unwinder climbs your stack and recovers the program counter of each function call, from the panic down to main. There's no list of frames to follow, so it rebuilds the chain with one repeated move: use the function's frame size to find the caller's stack pointer, read the return address sitting there as the caller's program counter, and repeat.
2. Symbolization takes each of those raw program counters and resolves it into something readable: the function name, the source file, and the line number. It does this by querying a compact metadata table the compiler baked into your binary (it's still there even in stripped builds).
The neat consequence: nothing is recorded as your program runs. The whole trace is reconstructed on the spot from build-time metadata.
I follow the full path, from the moment you panic() to the last line printed on your terminal.
Read it here: https://t.co/YcPWHbbFmK
#Go #Golang #Runtime
@mis2centavos La película Dr Strangelove nunca estuvo tan cercana a la realidad, increíble que ese sea el presidente del país todavía mas poderoso del mundo.
MySQL vs Postgres: storage engine addition.
Clustered indexes (MySQL) and heap tables (Postgres) each have unique advantages. Covered the differences and practical implications in the latest stream.
software engineering in 2026:
- your package manager is compromised
- your cloud provider blocks your account
- github itself is hacked
software is solved
The essential engineering cheatsheet of 2026:
agent → while loop
subagent → nested while loop
agent harness → the rest of the code
cloud agent → all the above, on EC2
Bienvenidos a un nuevo capítulo de "Educando al funcionario libertario". Vamos con una respuesta punto por punto. Hoy marchamos en defensa de la Universidad Pública! 🧵👇
The paperback of Deep Dive into a SQL Query finally arrived.
I ordered a copy from Amazon to check the print quality myself, and it came out better than I expected. Different feeling seeing it on paper instead of a screen.
Kindle and paperback link in the reply 👇
Coding agents cheat! I had it write some code and asked it to improve performance based on a benchmark. Boy did it cheat. My coworker had a similar experience with a different model. This points to a lack of common sense. Maybe this can be added to coding agents system prompt? (Rather than me having to put it in AGENTS.md.)
When Andres Freund, Linux kernel contributor & Microsoft engineer was debugging slow SSH logins on his Debian machine in March 2024, he noticed something weird:
liblzma (part of XZ Utils) was using way too much CPU power, so he kept digging, and what he uncovered was a multi-year supply-chain attack!
An attacker using the name “Jia Tan” had spent two years slowly infiltrating the tiny XZ Utils project, a compression library used by virtually every major Linux distribution.
The backdoor wasn’t in the source code. It was hidden deep inside the build scripts. It would have given the attacker remote root access on millions of servers the moment a specially crafted SSH key was used.
Freund caught it days before it would have shipped in Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and more.
One man, one anomaly, one routine debug session saved the internet from a potential catastrophe.
Respect!