codegangsta

Hey manucorporat! So fun seeing this on the frontpage of HN. I'm bummed our two paths didn't cross in person via a Go conference or something else. Wanted to say how happy I was to see Gin rise in popularity in the community. I think you did a great job taking some of the elegant bits from Martini and making some better technical tradeoffs that were more idiomatic for Go.

Great to see you here :D

Yeah I’m very much seeing this right now.

I’m a pretty big generalist professionally. I’ve done software engineering in a broad category of fields (Game engines, SaaS, OSS, distributed systems, highly polished UX and consumer products), while also having the experience of growing and managing Product and Design teams. I’ve worn a lot of hats over the years.

My most recent role I’m working on a net new product for the company and have basically been given fully agency over this product: from technical, budget, team, process, marketing, branding and positioning.

Give someone experienced like me capital, AI and freedom and you absolutely can build high quality software and a pretty blinding pace.

I’m starting to get the feeling than many folks struggling with adopting or embracing AI well for their job has more to do with their job/company than AI

Yeah I absolutely see it every day. I think it’s useful to separate the research/planning phase from the building/validadation/review phase.

Ticket trackers are perfect for this. Just start with asking AI to take this unclear, ambiguous ticket and come up with a real plan for how to accomplish it. Review the plan, update your ticket system with the plan, have coworkers review it if you want.

Then when ready, kick off a session for that first phase, first PR, or the whole thing if you want.

But planning like this is absolutely something AI can do. In fact, this is exactly the kind of thing we start with on our team when it comes to using AI agents. We have a ticket with just a simple title that somebody threw in there, and we asked the AI to spin up a bunch of research agents to understand and plan and ask itself those questions.

Funny enough, all the questions that you posed are things that come up right away that the agent asks itself, and then goes and tries to understand and validate an answer, sometimes with input from the user. But I think this planning mechanism is really critical to being able to have an AI generate an understanding, then have it be validated by a human before beginning implementation.

And by planning I don't necessarily mean plan mode in your agent harness of choice. We use a custom /plan skill in Claude Code that orchestrates all of this using multiple agents, validation loops, and specific prompts to weed out ambiguities by asking clarifying questions using the ask user question tool.

This results in taking really fuzzy requirements and making them clear, and we automate all of this through linear but you could use your ticket tracker of choice.

I think there are multiple conversations happening that are tying to converge on one.

On one hand, LLMs are overhyped and not delivering on promises made by their biggest advocates.

On the other hand, any other type of technology (not so overhyped) would be massively celebrated in significantly improving a subset of niche problems.

It’s worth acknowledging that LLMs do solve a good set of problems well, while also being overhyped as a silver bullet by folks who are generally really excited about its potential.

Reality is that none of us know what the future is, and whether LLMs will have enough breakthroughs to solve more problems then today, but what they do solve today is still very impressive as is.

Just wanted to chime in and say how appreciative I’ve been about all your replies here, and overall content on AI. Your takes are super reasonable and well thought out.

Man! I can’t agree more. It does seem foreign right now, but I truly do believe edge computing will become another “CDN” type abstraction, but it will take time for folks to catch up.

Can’t wait for the day that projects like litefs are just a default that nobody knows about, lol.

Go from “technology nobody knows about” to “technology nobody knows about, but runs the world.”

While there are lots of cloud providers also trying to be edge providers, I would argue that "The Far Edge" is a great opportunity to improve and develop infrastructure that is easier to run on your own hardware.

What worked for cloud won't work for edge in most cases. Having to do processing locally means processing on your own hardware.

We've seen this as the reason a lot of companies are adopting tools like NATS.io to be more cloud agnostic and/or be able to practically run at the Edge.

Really good points made here!

I previously worked for a company that empowers entrepreneurs and experts to build a business off their knowledge, and have learned a lot over the years of what's effective what's not so helpful.

The biggest factor for successful knowledge businesses was whether the person self-identified as an entrepreneur. It influenced how they saw their audience and engaged with them.

Ultimately you need to focus on both -- building and audience and a business. But there are far too many "creators" out there that are only interested in building an audience, and I personally believe, depending on the subject matter/industry, that it can be confusing and detrimental to not be engaging in both activities.

Have you looked at nats.io? High performance messaging with a flexible persistence layer. Servers can be meshed via leaf node connections. Perfect for IoT and edge

Disclaimer: NATS maintainer

NATS definitely tries to solve for that end to end experience, where you can have NATS simultaneously driving websocket connections as well as backend connections in a secure and performant way. I’ve personally had a ton of fun making interactive applications with NATS, it scales reliably and is really fun to work with

Disclaimer: I work on NATS and am employed by Synadia, maintainer of NATS.

NATS is much more lightweight than the alternatives, and has a much simpler operation story and can run on low resource hardware very easily.

Kafka fits a very specific use case, and NATS tries to solve a much larger set of distributed computing use cases, including micro-services, distributed KV, streaming, pub/sub, object store and more.

It’s a very different philosophy, but can be very powerful when it’s deployed as a utility inside an organization.

We’ve seen so many success stories, especially companies moving to the edge, we continue to see NATS used as a common transport for all kinds of use cases in finance, IoT, edge, Industry 4.0, and Retail

I find `if not` to be a far superior version, simply because it reads similarly to it's `if` counterpart, specifically for how conventionally condition methods are written in ruby.

`return if not valid?` or `return if invalid?`

Both make sense in my brain, whereas

`return unless valid?`

Feels like I need to make another connection to understand it

One thing I think a lot of folks don't realize about ADHD is that even with treatment, there is still a whole skillset to pick up regarding organization, self-management related to time etc. Many neurotypical people pick those things up over time, but those of us who are diagnosed late usually need to develop those skills, often for the first time.

That said, gaining those skill and having treatment feels like a superpower

Yup, not everyones diagnosis is the same, but mine was definitely combined with childhood trauma in a way that made it hard to notice anything was wrong in the first place. Can't begin to describe how much easier life feels now that I'm not using negative self talk to get through my day

Being very recently diagnosed with ADHD in my 30s (after searching for a source of my chronic exhaustion), it was interesting to notice just how much I masked my own ADHD from myself and others my whole life, where the experience of taking medication definitely matched "putting on glasses for the first time".

I've always felt like doing uninteresting things felt like wading through 3 feet of water, but I assumed everyone felt that, and that I was just lazy.

The biggest realization I had was that I have been using negative feelings/emotions in order to get stuff done for years. On the outside I looked like a productive, healthy person, on the inside I was beating myself down all day every day, and that behavior didn't lead to a great relationship with myself.

Now that I'm on medication, my brain actually rewards me for doing boring stuff. I see a dish in the sink and I want to rinse it and put it away because it feels good.

tldr; Just because you lead a successful, healthy life, your own perception on how hard life needs to be may still be skewed, and treatment for those who have been diagnosed with ADHD can really up your quality of life

Don't hesitate to join the NATS slack group and reach out if you need any help, we're a friendly bunch

Hey HN! I've just published a new episode of Rethink Connectivity, this time all about message persistence and streaming with NATS JetStream. I really love how streaming has been set up in NATS, it makes for some really cool hybrid architectures and gives you a TON of flexibility and options. Let me know what you think

Curious how your experience with NATS has been?

Author here. NATS is such an amazing (and underrated) technology IMHO I wanted to talk more about it with some screencasts. Would love your feedback and any suggestions for future screencasts on NATS.

I'm loving where the WASM world is going, and really do see something like NATS totally simplify the WASM/serverless use case in so many ways. Thanks for sharing!

disclosure: I work at Synadia

We do have a hosted version of NATS called NGS that is multi-cloud, multi-geo and is really easy to set up https://synadia.com/ngs

I think NATS is an excellent, and very easy to run and deploy. Pretty much has a "just works" attribute I like to assign to boring technology

I think that’s what the OP is getting at though. Writing can be really fun, but we like to play mind tricks on ourselves and inevitably make it harder

I generally agree with this. I think the rust community is one of the first to wholly embrace wasm as a compile target, hence what you are seeing. But Wasm does for sure go beyond rust and has some very interesting implications for for future of development IMO

You now get durability on whatever subjects you want via NATS Jetstream: https://docs.nats.io/nats-concepts/jetstream

No additional infrastructure, just enable it on the nodes you want persistence on and create a stream. Publishers don't even have to change, consumers have a great api with lots of options

Have you tried nats.io and it’s new streaming tech, Jetstream? Night and day difference in terms of management and ease of use. In my last org I was fighting so hard against folks wanting to adopt Kafka, and then I found out about nats, total game changer

This better explains how ruthlessly focused UI design needs to be. User Interface design needs to know the person on the other side, what their motives are and what makes them feel like they have superpowers. OpenSSL is a system. A GUI needs to bridge the gap between the system and the user, and it can’t be done in one implementation, because the types of user is super diverse. Makes the whole act of UI design increasingly challenging and fun all at the same time

I’ve been journaling daily for the past few years and it’s been really fun to tick through each day around a year previous to observe my current state. Most of it seems trite or meaningless, but collated it feels like a meaningful picture of who I was back then — what my struggles were and how they split between the distant and close.

TLDR; I highly recommend journaling daily. It forces you to slow down and plug into feelings which is automatically a better start to your day than usual