I built the first demo of Dark in Python, in about two weeks. A few months later when I started productizing it, I rebuilt it in OCaml. Back in 2017, when I was considering the language and platform to use for Dark, OCaml was extremely compelling: it’s a high-level language…

tl;dr there’s a Dark v2 roadmap now. There are a number of things missing for Dark to be able to have product market fit: Dark lacks SDKs for 3rd party APIs Dark lacks a good user account/authentication story While these are the major issues, solving these requires some more fundamental…

I’ve been working recently on a benchmark, to try and see how to get the most performance from the Dark backend. I’ve reimplemented the core of Dark in various languages and web frameworks, notably in OCaml, F# and Rust. As a reminder, Dark is a language and platform for building…

I was very recently the holder of three opinions: Rust is magic fairy dust that can fix all my problems Async is magic fairy dust that can fix all my problems GraphQL is magic fairy dust that can fix all my problems Unsurprisingly, all of these appear to be wrong…

On Saturday, we had our third contributor meetup, this one was organized by Shahriyar Nasir (thanks Shah!). This time, we did mob coding to add a Tuple type to Dark, and we recorded the whole thing. A tuple looks like this: let x = (somevar, "a string", 567) A tuple…

I’m about two weeks into Rust now, so this feels like a good time to write a critique, before I get Stockholm Syndrome’d. My main motivation in learning Rust is that I have to maintain some of Dark’s Rust code. There was a recent outage related to that code, and…

There was a wonderful post just now that I saw on HN as I was procrastinating writing this post. It was by Tim Bray, and it covered my favorite topic, which is just how batshit cloud services have gotten, this time Traffic Director on GCP. I don’t have anything more to say about this that you haven’t heard before, blah blah blah, complexity bad, blah blah, simplicity good. Which leads me quite nicely into some clarity I’ve gotten over the last few weeks. After reducing the team down to just me, I spent the last month doing a lot of thinking, really trying to get my head around where Dark is, what I should be doing, priorities, etc.

I’m always interested in stories about Accidental Complexity — when you waste time dealing with the endless layers of tooling that’s required to make a web application today. I’m also super into using Observability (which I’ll call to ability to introspect live systems, though that’s not exactly right). Fortunately for these two hobbies, I caused a partial outage of one of our systems due to terrible Accidental Complexity, and solved it using some delightful Observability. It’s Story Time, gather round!