What We Lose When We Build Alone
AI lets one person ship more than ever, but teams were never just a way to parallelize typing. On what we give up when we stop building together.
~/victorpierre.dev $ ls blog/
Blog
Notes on software engineering, systems design, tools, and the occasional reflection on working and living with technology.
Disclaimer
This is a collection of blog posts. They are mostly written to improve my writing skills and share my thoughts on various topics. They capture my thoughts at a specific point in time and may not reflect my current thinking. They are also not representative of my employer’s views, only my own.
Please take them with a grain of salt. They can be outdated, inaccurate, and I may have changed my mind since then. I hope you find them useful. Please feel free to reach out on Mastodon if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions.
Archive
Latest writing
Aligning Go struct fields to save memory
A printer’s composing caseeach sort of movable type packed so no space is wasted.
Building a Personal Knowledge System with Obsidian
Aztec obsidian bladeLouis Petich Collection, 13th–16th century. I tend to write things down a lot. I like to write notes during meeting, as I think through problems, as I need to …
Dual-Writes and the Outbox Pattern
The Great CourierAlois Petrak (Czech, 1811–1888). Your daily reconciliation job flags a problem: dozens of orders exist in your database, but no corresponding events ever reached …
Cooperation Without Dependency
Allegory of the 1st Partition of Polandthe European powers carving up a nation. “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with …
2025 - Retrospective
As we approach the end of 2025, I want to reflect once again on what I’ve experienced and learned this year, as well as my hopes and goals for the next. I’m reminded of …
Distributed Tracing in Go
Silk-throwing by handthe thread traced between two fixed points. (The Penny Magazine, 1843)
Stacked git branches with git-spice
Ever find yourself working on a feature that requires either creating a massive PR, which is hard to review, or waiting for each small change to be merged before you can proceed? …
2024 - Retrospective
2024 As 2024 draws to a close, I want to put into words my year-end reflection. It’s been an eventful journey filled with opportunities and unexpected changes. Personal: I …
Reproducible macOS Configurations with Nix
What is Nix? Nix is a powerful package manager 1 for Linux/Unix systems that offers a declarative approach to system configuration. With Nix, you define your system’s state …
User-centric feature design
Early in my career, I learned that the most successful features were those designed with the user in mind. Through regular client demos and feedback sessions, I discovered that …
Resilience and Mental Wellness in Uncertain Times
The Gulf StreamWinslow Homer, 1899.
Hasten Slowly in Software Development
The dolphin and anchorAldus Manutius’s printer’s mark for festina lente. Legend has it that the Roman Emperor Augustus Caesar held a particular fondness for the maxim …
Go Interfaces: Five Best-Practices for Enhanced Code Maintainability
When you’re coding in Go, you’ll quickly come to appreciate interfaces. An interface in Go is a type that spells out a set of methods. But here’s the interesting …
Enhancing Data Access with the Decorator Pattern in Go
Matryoshka dollseach shell wrapping the next. The decorator pattern is a structural design pattern that allows augmenting an object’s behaviour without altering its core …
A Beginner's Guide to Semantic Versioning
Semantic Versioning (SemVer) is a versioning scheme used in software development to provide a systematic approach for managing version numbers. It’s common for developers to …
Understanding Zero Values in Go
In Go, variables of basic types such as int, float64, bool, string, and others, will have a default value that is assigned by the compiler or runtime when no value is explicitly …
Escaping the internet's walled gardens
Towards a more decentralized and open internet
How I organize (most of) my Go microservices
When first learning Go, my initial instinct was to find a framework that would scaffold the basic folder structure and functionality that would allow me to build my first project. …
End-to-End tests with Venom
Glass beaker with snake-thread decorationRoman, Gallia Belgica, 4th century CE. What is Venom? Venom is an Open-Source tool for writing automated end-to-end and integration tests. …
An introduction to Protocol Buffers 3
What it is and why it matters
Five useful terminal tools for Developers
As a software developers, the terminal is an essential tool in our workflow. It provides a powerful interface to interact with the operating system and execute various commands. …
