Code Comprehension in the Age of AI
To keep AI-generated code understandable, make only changes you can explain and maintain a short map of the system's architecture.
~/victorpierre.dev ❯ ls blog/
Blog
Notes on software engineering, systems design, tools, and the occasional reflection on working and living with technology.
Disclaimer
Posts reflect my views when published, not my employer’s. Technical details may change, and so may my thinking. If you spot an error or want to discuss a post, reach out on
Mastodon.
Archive
Latest writing
What We Lose When We Build Alone
AI can help one person ship more, but it cannot replace the ideas, feedback, and learning that come from building with a team.
Aligning Go struct fields to save memory
Field order creates padding in Go structs; the right tools can find the waste and show how much memory reordering would save.
Building a Personal Knowledge System with Obsidian
I organize notes in Obsidian with links, Dataview, lightweight structure, and a simple daily workflow.
Dual-Writes and the Outbox Pattern
The transactional outbox stores business data and pending events in one transaction, then publishes the events asynchronously.
Cooperation Without Dependency
Europe and other democracies need sovereign digital infrastructure that can withstand geopolitical disruption while remaining interoperable.
2025 - Retrospective
In 2025, I returned to photography and Unity, worked with event-driven systems at scale, and learned to tune out more noise.
Distributed Tracing in Go
OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, and context propagation reveal where requests travel and stall across distributed Go services.
Stacked git branches with git-spice
Git-spice makes stacked branches easier to create, update, and keep in sync as pull requests change.
2024 - Retrospective
In 2024, I changed jobs, travelled through Canada and Europe, and learned to embrace uncertainty while planning for what comes next.
Reproducible macOS Configurations with Nix
This guide uses Nix flakes and nix-darwin to configure macOS declaratively and reproduce the setup on another machine.
User-centric feature design
This process keeps feature design focused on users by moving from problems and journeys to solutions, feedback, and iteration.
Resilience and Mental Wellness in Uncertain Times
Stoic ideas about perception, control, and adversity can help manage stress during layoffs and rapid change in the tech industry.
Hasten Slowly in Software Development
Careful planning, small releases, and deliberate decisions often get software shipped sooner than rushing does.
Go Interfaces: Five Best-Practices for Enhanced Code Maintainability
Five practical rules help keep Go interfaces small and composable without coupling callers to concrete implementations.
Enhancing Data Access with the Decorator Pattern in Go
Go interfaces and the decorator pattern can add caching, logging, and metrics without changing a data layer's core logic.
A Beginner's Guide to Semantic Versioning
This guide explains major, minor, and patch versions, release candidates, and automated releases with GitHub Actions.
Understanding Zero Values in Go
Go initializes every type with a zero value; understanding those defaults helps prevent nil errors and produce more useful APIs.
Escaping the internet's walled gardens
ActivityPub and the Fediverse let independent social platforms communicate without putting a single company in control.
How I organize (most of) my Go microservices
I structure Go microservices around the standard library, with clear places for APIs, deployment files, documentation, and scripts.
End-to-End tests with Venom
Venom makes it possible to write end-to-end and integration tests in YAML using variables, executors, and project-level configuration.
An introduction to Protocol Buffers 3
Protocol Buffers 3 uses messages, field types, and tag numbers to define schemas that can evolve without breaking existing clients.
Five useful terminal tools for Developers
I use chezmoi, delta, lazydocker, lazygit, and bat to manage dotfiles, read files and diffs, and navigate Git and Docker from the terminal.
