Bram Geron
LightNews LightNews
banner
bram.xyz
Bram Geron
@bram.xyz
140 followers 240 following 650 posts
Rust, product. He/they. Nushell&jujutsu fanboi. Live in 🐻 Berlin

Used to do research on programming languages.

Standing with 🇵🇸 is standing with human rights.

@bgeron on other networks.
Posts Replies Media Videos
bram.xyz
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?”
October 17, 2025 at 9:47 AM
bram.xyz
@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
October 4, 2025 at 8:00 AM
bram.xyz
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.”
August 25, 2025 at 6:03 PM
bram.xyz
“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)
August 25, 2025 at 5:54 PM
bram.xyz
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:
August 24, 2025 at 1:02 PM
bram.xyz
Damn I’m loving Kagi
Kagi answering “was 2000 24 years ago” correctly and clearly Kagi answering “Was 2000 25 years ago?” correctly
August 23, 2025 at 6:56 AM
bram.xyz
TIL vendor extensions are making OpenAPI a lot more useful
Newsletter excerpt. API generator startups Many other companies offer SDK generators from OpenAPI specifications. Here are three VC-funded startups that build tools which make a breeze of building and maintaining OpenAPI-based SDKs. Coincidentally, all were founded in 2022 and have each raised between $13-28M in funding, to date. Stainless: is used by AI providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta (for Llama models), and platforms like Cloudflare and Mux. Languages supported: TypeScript, Python, Go, Java, Kotlin. The promise of Stainless is not having to hire the “usual” one engineer per SDK to build/maintain. Stainless charges $2,500/month for 5 SDKs, supporting up to 150 endpoints per SDK. Speakeasy: generates both SDKs, API docs, Terraform providers, and end-to-end tests. It is used by Mistral AI and Vercel. Languages supported: TypeScript, Python, Go, Java, C#. Speakeasy relies on its own OpenAPI vendor extension to add support for things missing from OpenAPI like pagination, streaming, and retry automation. Speakeasy charges $600/month per language, supporting up to 200 endpoints. Languages supported: TypeScript, Python, Go, Java, C#. Fern: used by Square, LaunchDarkly, Pinecone or Cohere. Languages supported: TypeScript, Python, Go, Java, C#, PHP, Ruby. Fern supports the API specification not only as OpenAI, but also as AsyncAPI, gRPC, OpenRPC, or its own Fern Definition for the best experience. The company charges $600/month per SDK for up to 150 endpoints. Other vendors include APIMatic, liblab, and Microsoft’s Kiota.
August 10, 2025 at 11:41 AM
bram.xyz
Newsletter excerpt. RED and USE Once you've defined your SLIs, there are two frameworks I rely on: - RED: Rate, Errors, Duration. These focus on user-facing performance. - USE: Utilization, Saturation, Errors. These focus on system health. You track both because they answer different questions.
August 10, 2025 at 11:00 AM
bram.xyz
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
June 3, 2025 at 9:44 PM
bram.xyz
“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.“
April 28, 2025 at 10:21 AM
bram.xyz
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
April 21, 2025 at 11:04 PM
bram.xyz
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
March 19, 2025 at 10:36 PM
bram.xyz
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.
March 8, 2025 at 3:46 PM
bram.xyz
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.
February 11, 2025 at 3:55 PM
bram.xyz
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...
Someone is slowly typing JSON into a terminal program. The JSON is an array of objects. The program gradually renders the JSON input as Rust debug output, and as a table. The fields of the Rust struct are printed even though they are missing in the JSON input. The example program is called "live".
February 11, 2025 at 3:55 PM
bram.xyz
@ewolff.com explains why agile projects tend to tip away to non-agile.

I find myself agreeing as he partially refutes the agile manifesto.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=23eY...

Audio in 🇩🇪 but the autotranslated captions are very decent. Great talk.
Slide from a presentation. This slide is about principles behind the Agile Manifesto. It investigates the principle of working software being the primary measure of progress. No it is not! Business value is the primary measure of progress. Because when you implement the wrong features, then there is no value in working software.
January 14, 2025 at 10:12 PM