garyblankenship

The Ancient Greek Who Solved Your Modern Existential Crisis (And Why I Can't Stop Thinking About Him)

Before therapy apps and mindfulness retreats, before nihilism went mainstream, before we all started joking about the heat death of the universe on Twitter, one ancient philosopher had already figured out how to live without cosmic purpose. And once you see what Epicurus was really saying, you can't unsee it.

Here's the thing that's been keeping me up: we're living through a meaning crisis that someone solved 2,300 years ago. Not partially solved. Not gestured toward. Actually solved, with a four-part formula and everything. But we're so busy inventing new ways to be anxious about existence that we missed the guy who looked at an indifferent universe and said "perfect, that's exactly what I was hoping for."

The Philosopher Who Saw The Matrix (Without the Machines)

341-270 BCE: When Atoms Were Just a Theory

garyblankenship

Advanced Agent Orchestration in Claude Code: From Middleware Chains to Parallel Synthesis

A comprehensive guide to building self-orchestrating, parallel-executing, consensus-building agent workflows that actually work

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The Breakthrough Moment

Picture this: You're building a complex multi-agent workflow in Claude Code. You need agents to coordinate, pass information, and execute in sequence. You reach for the obvious solution - have one agent call another using a Task tool.

garyblankenship

DSPy-Go Production Reference: The Complete Technical Guide

Architectural Foundation: From Prompting to Programming

The Paradigm Shift

DSPy transforms LLM development from artisanal prompt engineering to systematic software engineering. Prompts become learnable parameters in a computational graph, optimized against defined metrics rather than hand-tuned through trial and error.

Core Philosophy

• Declarative Contracts: Define what, not how
• Systematic Optimization: Replace guesswork with formal optimization loops

garyblankenship

LLM Tool Loops Are Slow - Here's What to Actually Do

The standard LLM tool-calling pattern is an anti-pattern for production. Every tool call costs 200-500ms of LLM latency plus tokens for the entire conversation history. Let me show you what actually works.

The Problem With Standard Tool Calling

Here's what happens in the naive implementation:

# What the tutorials show you

garyblankenship

Go's Hidden Philosophy: Why Simple Rules Create Bulletproof Code

Transform your Go development from good to exceptional with principles that reveal the language's true power

Every Go developer faces the same evolution: first you learn the syntax, then you write code that works, and finally—if you're fortunate—you discover the deeper patterns that make Go truly powerful. Most developers get stuck at stage two, writing Go code that technically functions but fights against the language's grain.

The difference between good and exceptional Go developers isn't knowledge of advanced features—it's understanding the philosophical constraints that make Go's simplicity so powerful. Go doesn't give you every tool; it gives you the right tools and makes the wrong choices harder to make.

This guide reveals the nine interconnected patterns that form Go's hidden philosophy. Master these mental models, and you'll find yourself writing code that feels inevitable—code that looks like the language itself suggested the

garyblankenship

Git Worktrees: How We Replaced Our Entire Branch Management Strategy With a Feature Nobody Uses

We had 14 developers, 3 active releases, and a monorepo that took 12 minutes to clone. Every context switch was killing us. That's when someone suggested using Git's most ignored feature as our entire development workflow.

Here's how we've been running our 400GB monorepo with instant context switching for 18 months—using a Git feature so obscure that most developers don't know it exists.

The Impossible Situation

Picture this: Critical production bug comes in. You're 800 lines deep into a refactoring. The junior dev who could handle it is knee-deep in their own feature branch. The senior who knows that code is reviewing a PR.

garyblankenship

SQLite Wants One Writer But You Have Twenty: A Production Story

Everyone said SQLite can't handle concurrent writes. Everyone was wrong. They just weren't creative enough with their definition of "handle."

Here's how we've been running 50+ concurrent processes writing to a single SQLite database for 18 months—and why it's more reliable than the PostgreSQL cluster it replaced.

The Impossible Situation

We were building a distributed file scanner (props) that needed to catalog millions of files across multiple machines. The requirements were simple enough to make you weep:

garyblankenship

SQLite Is Lying to You About Concurrent Writes

I lost three days of customer data before I realized SQLite's "database is locked" errors were just the symptom. The real disease was silent corruption happening in production.

You've probably deployed SQLite thinking it handles concurrent writes. The documentation says it does. The internet says it does. Hell, even your tests pass. But there's a specific scenario where SQLite will corrupt your database so quietly you won't notice until your backups are also toast.

The Conventional Approach: Why WAL Mode Isn't Saving You

Everyone tells you to enable Write-Ahead Logging. "It solves concurrency!" they say. Let me show you the code that's probably in your production right now.

garyblankenship

The Complete Cloudflare Free Tier Guide

Generated on: 7/18/2025, 8:22:50 PM

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The $0 Infrastructure Stack: Building Production Apps on Cloudflare's Free Tier

Introduction

garyblankenship

The Day I Stopped Fighting Go and Started Thinking Like a Compiler

I spent three years writing Go like it was PHP with different syntax. Then I debugged one race condition that changed everything.

You know that moment when you realize you've been fundamentally wrong about something? For me, it happened at 2am, staring at a goroutine panic that shouldn't exist. I'd been treating Go like a stricter PHP—same patterns, just more typing. That night, everything clicked: Go isn't PHP with static types. It's a completely different way of thinking about code.

The Unexpected Superpower: Your AI Actually Understands Go

Before we dive into my painful journey, here's something nobody told me about Go: LLMs write it scary well. I mean genuinely excellent, production-ready code. Not the "looks right but has subtle bugs" code you get with dynamic languages—actual working Go.