About

This is the backstory for reverse-bin: My Retro-Futuristic Successor to CGI-BIN. In the early 2000s Linux was cool, corporate types used Windows and kids were learning Linux. Linux systems were multi-user and ~/public_html was the way to publish a static website and one could do some backflips with apache config to get something similar for dynamic websites using PHP or general-purpose cgi-bin. cgi-bin cgi-bin was the simplest possible way for any web server to launch dynamic apps. HTTP headers would get translated to environment variables and stdout into your response, it was dead simple. ...

I feel that the modern way of hosting apps is too complex and the old cgi-bin way was also suboptimal. I kept the cgi-bin subprocess model and married it with reverse proxying in https://github.com/tarasglek/caddy-reverse-bin/. I believe this way is easier to customize, use and secure than the “modern” corporate stack. reverse-bin Imagine if our reverse-proxy corporate future took a different evolutionary path. Imagine that instead of deprecating cgi-bin, we made a successor and taught it to speak multiplexed http2 on stdin instead! Remember, multi-process is great cos that’s also the secret to using operating-system native sandboxes, eg JS, golang and even naughty C++ I wrote before could be sandboxed using something like landlock, pledge, gvisor or in microvm. ...

We live in the age of software as a service, secret keys are everywhere. Yet somehow it is still normal to click-manage secrets. Smart people share them via signal,smarter people, share them via a password manager like Bitwarden. Super-advanced people punch them into GitHub UI and only let github actions have access to secrets. Infra-devops people spin up Vault or AWS secret manager or similar to inject secrets. In all situations secrets have a lifecycle that is completely disconnected from code, causing the two to get out of sync or worse. ...

I relax by programming. It’s especially satisfying to play with something that changes how I think about a topic. I once discovered eget and realized that most modern software ships as a single binary attached to a GitHub release. Recently my friend, David, had a further realization that what would make eget better is if it itself was easier to get (ha!). I thought it would be delightful to have a WASI eget cli to fetch native binaries. These days almost everything cross-compiles trivially to WASI command modules. Those are basically little unix cli apps that have a small footprint and can run anywhere (something Java never achieved). ...

I decided to write down some thoughts on agentic coding and why it’s a very hyped wrong turn. Let me start with some background on my LLM experience. I adopted LLMs into my work in Aug 2020. I was sold when I saw that GPT-3 could generate usable SQL statements. Something that used to take 4-8 hours of RTFMing, now took 15min. I have since worked on chatcraft.org, various RAG frameworks, etc. I use aider heavily for work, frequently switch models, have been struggling with tool calling during dark ages before MCP. ...