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Ben Congdon
Personal blog · benjamincongdon.meprogrammingsystemsai
Ben Congdon's personal blog at benjamincongdon.me covers programming, systems and ai. Since 2018, 34 different Hacker News readers have linked it 68 times, most often “A Tour of Go 1.16's io/fs package”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-19, and you can follow it by feed.
The personal website of Ben Congdon
Most-linked posts?
- A Tour of Go 1.16's io/fs package4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-01-21
- Avoid Load-Bearing Shell Scripts4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-10-29
- In Praise of Stacked PRs4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-07-18
- Solving the “Miracle Sudoku” in Prolog3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-05-24
- Python Idioms in Rust2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-29
- Sinc Split Mechanical Keyboard Build Log2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-07-31
- B-Trees: More Than I Thought I'd Want to Know (2021)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-08-18
- Building a DIY Pen Plotter: MidTbot2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-07-13
- Mental Model: Difficult Problems vs. Hard Work2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-06-23
- DIY Air Quality Sensor2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-08-09
What Hacker News says?
https://benjamincongdon.me/blog I like to write about productivity, Go/Rust, and my various web development projects. I also tend to write pretty frequently about programming language ergonomics. Popular posts: * https://benjamincongdon.me/blog/2019/11/11/The-Value-in-Gos-... * https://benjamincongdon.me/blog/2018/03/23/Python-Idioms-in-... * https://benjamincongdon.me/blog/2018/03/01/Scraping-the-Web-... Favorite p…
Comment linking /books
on “Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?”Submitted The Value in Go’s Simplicity as a story · 368 points
HN discussionI ordered like 5 of them the other day from JLCPCB it was like 6 bucks shipped to my place. I saw this post online, I’ve had the pm2.5 sensor sitting around for a long time… https://benjamincongdon.me/blog/2021/08/08/DIY-Air-Quality-S...
Comment linking /blog/2021/08/08/DIY-Air-Quality-Sensor/
on “Monitoring my home's air quality with AirGradient's DIY sensor”Submitted Goodbye IFTTT as a story · 357 points
HN discussionOfficial docs may not be there yet, but lots of people have written guides, like: https://benjamincongdon.me/blog/2021/01/21/A-Tour-of-Go-116s...
Comment linking /blog/2021/01/21/A-Tour-of-Go-116s-iofs-package/
on “Go 1.16 Release Notes”Submitted B-Trees: More Than I Thought I'd Want to Know (2021) as a story · 319 points
HN discussionhttps://benjamincongdon.me/blog/2020/05/23/Solving-the-Mirac... has the list of all the boards that are 'miracle' sudoku. Only 72.
Comment linking /blog/2020/05/23/Solving-the-Miracle-Sudoku-in-Prolog/all_boards.txt
on “Solving the “Miracle Sudoku” in Prolog”Submitted Solving the “Miracle Sudoku” in Prolog as a story · 276 points
HN discussionI don't think its a question of whether there is an essential reality or not, but rather whether we have access to essential reality. Donald Hoffman makes a strong game theoretical argument for how natural selection chooses effective presentations of reality rather than necessarily accurate ones [1]. Based on your level of interest in this conversation I'd expect you would really enjoy that book! The game is certain…
Comment linking /blog/2021/02/21/Three-Layers-of-Information/
on “A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter”Submitted B-Trees: More Than I Thought I'd Want to Know as a story · 239 points
HN discussionFor me, it depends on the type of problem I'm trying to solve. Specifically, I ask is it hard work or a difficult problem? (see also [1], [2], and HN commentary at [3] from a short time ago). Hard work is something that a big corp can solve by throwing bodies at the problem. A proprietary data format or protocol but with an available, thorough specification (eg. a giant PDF from an international standard, an industr…
Comment linking /blog/2022/06/22/Mental-Model-Difficult-Problems-vs.-Hard-Work/
on “Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?”Submitted AI slop, suspicion, and writing back as a story · 231 points
HN discussionHi HN, author here. Corral is my attempt at a performant, easy-to-deploy MapReduce. Unlike traditional frameworks like Hadoop, it uses AWS Lambda for execution and is “serverless” as a result. It was initially kicked-off by AWS adding Lambda support for Go, but draws on experience I’ve had using Lambda tools like Zappa[1] and Serverless[2] in the past. I think there’s a lot of interesting applications for using func…
Comment linking /blog/2018/05/02/Introducing-Corral-A-Serverless-MapReduce-Framework/
on “Show HN: Corral – A Serverless MapReduce Framework”Submitted In Praise of Stacked PRs as a story · 225 points
HN discussion++ to stacking - google has lots of folk's writing on this, ie: https://benjamincongdon.me/blog/2022/07/17/In-Praise-of-Stac... The general idea is that you have a chance to parallelize waiting for review with you writing more code, leading to high-velocity small PRs and never being blocked.
Comment linking /blog/2022/07/17/In-Praise-of-Stacked-PRs/
on “The ideal PR is 50 lines long”Submitted Python Idioms in Rust as a story · 182 points
HN discussionInteresting to know there are only 72 solution boards that meet the Miracle Sudoku constraints. full list: https://benjamincongdon.me/blog/2020/05/23/Solving-the-Mirac...
Comment linking /blog/2020/05/23/Solving-the-Miracle-Sudoku-in-Prolog/all_boards.txt
on “Solving the “Miracle Sudoku” in Prolog”Submitted Mental Model: Difficult Problems vs. Hard Work as a story · 162 points
HN discussionFor any long work, I love having a draft PR going, and then making PR's into that. Its basically like stacked PRs but I don't need each PR to be shippable independently. The advantage is so nice. You can make a bunch of finer-grained PRs that have really good descriptions for what happened, what's changing. And it builds a big PR that has the top-down view. It creates a very understandable hierarchy of understanding…
Comment linking /blog/2022/07/17/In-Praise-of-Stacked-PRs/
on “Stacked PRs – Pros and Cons?”Submitted Agentic Monitoring as a story · 123 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Coming Need for Formal Specification as a story · 64 points
HN discussionSubmitted Building a DIY Pen Plotter: MidTbot as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted Solving the “Miracle Sudoku” in Prolog as a story · 9 points
HN discussionSubmitted In Praise of Stacked PRs as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted I Use AI: Early 2025 as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted DIY Air Quality Sensor as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted When Red Buttons Aren't Enough as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Tour of Go 1.16's io/fs package as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Scraping the Web in Golang with Colly and Goquery as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Zip Files as (Simple) Key-Value Stores as a story · 3 points
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